Title: The Common Reader, First Series (1925)
Author: Virginia Woolf
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THE COMMON READER

FIRST SERIES

VIRGINIA WOOLF

1925

TO LYTTON STRACHEY

Some of these papers appeared originally in the Times Literary
Supplement, the Athenaeum, the Nation and
Athanaeum, the New Statesman, the London Mercury,
the Dial (New York); the New Republic (New York), and I
have to thank the editors for allowing me to reprint them here. Some
are based upon articles written for various newspapers, while others
appear now for the first time.

There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson's Life of Gray which might well
be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries,
yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by
private people. ". . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader;
for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary
prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism
of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours."
It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon
a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave
behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man's
approval.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic
and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him
so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart
knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided
by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends
he can come by, some kind of whole--a portrait of a man, a sketch of
an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads,
to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the
temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object
to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and
superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old
furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may
be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his
deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he
has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of
poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down
a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves,
yet contribute to so mighty a result.

The tower of Caister Castle still rises ninety feet into the air,
and the arch still stands from which Sir John Fastolf's barges sailed
out to fetch stone for the building of the great castle. But now
jackdaws nest on the tower, and of the castle, which once covered six
acres of ground, only ruined walls remain, pierced by loop-holes and
surmounted by battlements, though there are neither archers within
nor cannon without. As for the "seven religious men" and the "seven
poor folk" who should, at this very moment, be praying for the souls
of Sir John and his parents, there is no sign of them nor sound of
their prayers. The place is a ruin. Antiquaries speculate and
differ.

1The Paston Letters, edited by Dr. James
Gairdner (1904), 4 vols.

Not so very far off lie more ruins--the ruins of Bromholm Priory,
where John Paston was buried, naturally enough, since his house was
only a mile or so away, lying on low ground by the sea, twenty miles
north of Norwich. The coast is dangerous, and the land, even in our
time, inaccessible. Nevertheless, the little bit of wood at Bromholm,
the fragment of the true Cross, brought pilgrims incessantly to the
Priory, and sent them away with eyes opened and limbs straightened.
But some of them with their newly-opened eyes saw a sight which
shocked them--the grave of John Paston in Bromholm Priory without a
tombstone. The news spread over the country-side. The Pastons had
fallen; they that had been so powerful could no longer afford a stone
to put above John Paston's head. Margaret, his widow, could not pay
her debts; the eldest son, Sir John, wasted his property upon women
and tournaments, while the younger, John also, though a man of
greater parts, thought more of his hawks than of his harvests.

The pilgrims of course were liars, as people whose eyes have just
been opened by a piece of the true Cross have every right to be; but
their news, none the less, was welcome. The Pastons had risen in the
world. People said even that they had been bondmen not so very long
ago. At any rate, men still living could remember John's grandfather
Clement tilling his own land, a hard-working peasant; and William,
Clement's son, becoming a judge and buying land; and John, William's
son, marrying well and buying more land and quite lately inheriting
the vast new castle at Caister, and all Sir John's lands in Norfolk
and Suffolk. People said that he had forged the old knight's will.
What wonder, then, that he lacked a tombstone? But, if we consider
the character of Sir John Paston, John's eldest son, and his
upbringing and his surroundings, and the relations between himself
and his father as the family letters reveal them, we shall see how
difficult it was, and how likely to be neglected--this business of
making his father's tombstone.

For let us imagine, in the most desolate part of England known to
us at the present moment, a raw, new-built house, without telephone,
bathroom or drains, arm-chairs or newspapers, and one shelf perhaps
of books, unwieldy to hold, expensive to come by. The windows look
out upon a few cultivated fields and a dozen hovels, and beyond them
there is the sea on one side, on the other a vast fen. A single road
crosses the fen, but there is a hole in it, which, one of the farm
hands reports, is big enough to swallow a carriage. And, the man
adds, Tom Topcroft, the mad bricklayer, has broken loose again and
ranges the country half-naked, threatening to kill any one who
approaches him. That is what they talk about at dinner in the
desolate house, while the chimney smokes horribly, and the draught
lifts the carpets on the floor. Orders are given to lock all gates at
sunset, and, when the long dismal evening has worn itself away,
simply and solemnly, girt about with dangers as they are, these
isolated men and women fall upon their knees in prayer.

In the fifteenth century, however, the wild landscape was broken
suddenly and very strangely by vast piles of brand-new masonry. There
rose out of the sandhills and heaths of the Norfolk coast a huge bulk
of stone, like a modern hotel in a watering-place; but there was no
parade, no lodging-houses, and no pier at Yarmouth then, and this
gigantic building on the outskirts of the town was built to house one
solitary old gentleman without any children--Sir John Fastolf, who
had fought at Agincourt and acquired great wealth. He had fought at
Agincourt and got but little reward. No one took his advice. Men
spoke ill of him behind his back. He was well aware of it; his temper
was none the sweeter for that. He was a hot-tempered old man,
powerful, embittered by a sense of grievance. But whether on the
battlefield or at court he thought perpetually of Caister, and how,
when his duties allowed, he would settle down on his father's land
and live in a great house of his own building.

The gigantic structure of Caister Castle was in progress not so
many miles away when the little Pastons were children. John Paston,
the father, had charge of some part of the business, and the children
listened, as soon as they could listen at all, to talk of stone and
building, of barges gone to London and not yet returned, of the
twenty-six private chambers, of the hall and chapel; of foundations,
measurements, and rascally work-people. Later, in 1454, when the work
was finished and Sir John had come to spend his last years at
Caister, they may have seen for themselves the mass of treasure that
was stored there; the tables laden with gold and silver plate; the
wardrobes stuffed with gowns of velvet and satin and cloth of gold,
with hoods and tippets and beaver hats and leather jackets and velvet
doublets; and how the very pillow-cases on the beds were of green and
purple silk. There were tapestries everywhere. The beds were laid and
the bedrooms hung with tapestries representing sieges, hunting and
hawking, men fishing, archers shooting, ladies playing on their
harps, dallying with ducks, or a giant "bearing the leg of a bear in
his hand ". Such were the fruits of a well-spent life. To buy land,
to build great houses, to stuff these houses full of gold and silver
plate (though the privy might well be in the bedroom), was the proper
aim of mankind. Mr. and Mrs. Paston spent the greater part of their
energies in the same exhausting occupation. For since the passion to
acquire was universal, one could never rest secure in one's
possessions for long. The outlying parts of one's property were in
perpetual jeopardy. The Duke of Norfolk might covet this manor, the
Duke of Suffolk that. Some trumped-up excuse, as for instance that
the Pastons were bondmen, gave them the right to seize the house and
batter down the lodges in the owner's absence. And how could the
owner of Paston and Mauteby and Drayton and Gresham be in five or six
places at once, especially now that Caister Castle was his, and he
must be in London trying to get his rights recognised by the King?
The King was mad too, they said; did not know his own child, they
said; or the King was in flight; or there was civil war in the land.
Norfolk was always the most distressed of counties and its country
gentlemen the most quarrelsome of mankind. Indeed, had Mrs. Paston
chosen, she could have told her children how when she was a young
woman a thousand men with bows and arrows and pans of burning fire
had marched upon Gresham and broken the gates and mined the walls of
the room where she sat alone. But much worse things than that had
happened to women. She neither bewailed her lot nor thought herself a
heroine. The long, long letters which she wrote so laboriously in her
clear cramped hand to her husband, who was (as usual) away, make no
mention of herself. The sheep had wasted the hay. Heyden's and
Tuddenham's men were out. A dyke had been broken and a bullock
stolen. They needed treacle badly, and really she must have stuff for
a dress.

But Mrs. Paston did not talk about herself.

Thus the little Pastons would see their mother writing or
dictating page after page, hour after hour, long long letters, but to
interrupt a parent who writes so laboriously of such important
matters would have been a sin. The prattle of children, the lore of
the nursery or schoolroom, did not find its way into these elaborate
communications. For the most part her letters are the letters of an
honest bailiff to his master, explaining, asking advice, giving news,
rendering accounts. There was robbery and manslaughter; it was
difficult to get in the rents; Richard Calle had gathered but little
money; and what with one thing and another Margaret had not had time
to make out, as she should have done, the inventory of the goods
which her husband desired. Well might old Agnes, surveying her son's
affairs rather grimly from a distance, counsel him to contrive it so
that "ye may have less to do in the world; your father said, In
little business lieth much rest. This world is but a thoroughfare,
and full of woe; and when we depart therefrom, right nought bear with
us but our good deeds and ill."

The thought of death would thus come upon them in a clap. Old
Fastolf, cumbered with wealth and property, had his vision at the end
of Hell fire, and shrieked aloud to his executors to distribute alms,
and see that prayers were said "in perpetuum", so that his soul might
escape the agonies of purgatory. William Paston, the judge, was
urgent too that the monks of Norwich should be retained to pray for
his soul "for ever". The soul was no wisp of air, but a solid body
capable of eternal suffering, and the fire that destroyed it was as
fierce as any that burnt on mortal grates. For ever there would be
monks and the town of Norwich, and for ever the Chapel of Our Lady in
the town of Norwich. There was something matter-of-fact, positive,
and enduring in their conception both of life and of death.

With the plan of existence so vigorously marked out, children of
course were well beaten, and boys and girls taught to know their
places. They must acquire land; but they must obey their parents. A
mother would clout her daughter's head three times a week and break
the skin if she did not conform to the laws of behaviour. Agnes
Paston, a lady of birth and breeding, beat her daughter Elizabeth.
Margaret Paston, a softer-hearted woman, turned her daughter out of
the house for loving the honest bailiff Richard Calle. Brothers would
not suffer their sisters to marry beneath them, and "sell candle and
mustard in Framlingham". The fathers quarrelled with the sons, and
the mothers, fonder of their boys than of their girls, yet bound by
all law and custom to obey their husbands, were torn asunder in their
efforts to keep the peace. With all her pains, Margaret failed to
prevent rash acts on the part of her eldest son John, or the bitter
words with which his father denounced him. He was a "drone among
bees", the father burst out, "which labour for gathering honey in the
fields, and the drone doth naught but taketh his part of it". He
treated his parents with insolence, and yet was fit for no charge of
responsibility abroad.

But the quarrel was ended, very shortly, by the death (22nd May
1466) of John Paston, the father, in London. The body was brought
down to Bromholm to be buried. Twelve poor men trudged all the way
bearing torches beside it. Alms were distributed; masses and dirges
were said. Bells were rung. Great quantities of fowls, sheep, pigs,
eggs, bread, and cream were devoured, ale and wine drunk, and candles
burnt. Two panes were taken from the church windows to let out the
reek of the torches. Black cloth was distributed, and a light set
burning on the grave. But John Paston, the heir, delayed to make his
father's tombstone.

He was a young man, something over twenty-four years of age. The
discipline and the drudgery of a country life bored him. When he ran
away from home, it was, apparently, to attempt to enter the King's
household. Whatever doubts, indeed, might be cast by their enemies on
the blood of the Pastons, Sir John was unmistakably a gentleman. He
had inherited his lands; the honey was his that the bees had gathered
with so much labour. He had the instincts of enjoyment rather than of
acquisition, and with his mother's parsimony was strangely mixed
something of his father's ambition. Yet his own indolent and
luxurious temperament took the edge from both. He was attractive to
women, liked society and tournaments, and court life and making bets,
and sometimes, even, reading books. And so life now that John Paston
was buried started afresh upon rather a different foundation. There
could be little outward change indeed. Margaret still ruled the
house. She still ordered the lives of the younger children as she had
ordered the lives of the elder. The boys still needed to be beaten
into book-learning by their tutors, the girls still loved the wrong
men and must be married to the right. Rents had to be collected; the
interminable lawsuit for the Fastolf property dragged on. Battles
were fought; the roses of York and Lancaster alternately faded and
flourished. Norfolk was full of poor people seeking redress for their
grievances, and Margaret worked for her son as she had worked for her
husband, with this significant change only, that now, instead of
confiding in her husband, she took the advice of her priest.

But inwardly there was a change. It seems at last as if the hard
outer shell had served its purpose and something sensitive,
appreciative, and pleasure-loving had formed within. At any rate Sir
John, writing to his brother John at home, strayed sometimes from the
business on hand to crack a joke, to send a piece of gossip, or to
instruct him, knowingly and even subtly, upon the conduct of a love
affair. Be "as lowly to the mother as ye list, but to the maid not
too lowly, nor that ye be too glad to speed, nor too sorry to fail.
And I shall always be your herald both here, if she come hither, and
at home, when I come home, which I hope hastily within XI. days at
the furthest." And then a hawk was to be bought, a hat, or new silk
laces sent down to John in Norfolk, prosecuting his suit, flying his
hawks, and attending with considerable energy and not too nice a
sense of honesty to the affairs of the Paston estates.

The lights had long since burnt out on John Paston's grave. But
still Sir John delayed; no tomb replaced them. He had his excuses;
what with the business of the lawsuit, and his duties at Court, and
the disturbance of the civil wars, his time was occupied and his
money spent. But perhaps something strange had happened to Sir John
himself, and not only to Sir John dallying in London, but to his
sister Margery falling in love with the bailiff, and to Walter making
Latin verses at Eton, and to John flying his hawks at Paston. Life
was a little more various in its pleasures. They were not quite so
sure as the elder generation had been of the rights of man and of the
dues of God, of the horrors of death, and of the importance of
tombstones. Poor Margaret Paston scented the change and sought
uneasily, with the pen which had marched so stiffly through so many
pages, to lay bare the root of her troubles. It was not that the
lawsuit saddened her; she was ready to defend Caister with her own
hands if need be, "though I cannot well guide nor rule soldiers", but
there was something wrong with the family since the death of her
husband and master. Perhaps her son had failed in his service to God;
he had been too proud or too lavish in his expenditure; or perhaps he
had shown too little mercy to the poor. Whatever the fault might be,
she only knew that Sir John spent twice as much money as his father
for less result; that they could scarcely pay their debts without
selling land, wood, or household stuff ("It is a death to me to think
if it"); while every day people spoke ill of them in the country
because they left John Paston to lie without a tombstone. The money
that might have bought it, or more land, and more goblets and more
tapestry, was spent by Sir John on clocks and trinkets, and upon
paying a clerk to copy out Treatises upon Knighthood and other such
stuff. There they stood at Paston--eleven volumes, with the poems of
Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air into the
gaunt, comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity,
distracting their thoughts from business, and leading them not only
to neglect their own profit but to think lightly of the sacred dues
of the dead.

For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his
crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad
daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room
with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he
would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming--or what
strange intoxication was it that he drew from books? Life was rough,
cheerless, and disappointing. A whole year of days would pass
fruitlessly in dreary business, like dashes of rain on the
window-pane. There was no reason in it as there had been for his
father; no imperative need to establish a family and acquire an
important position for children who were not born, or if born, had no
right to bear their father's name. But Lydgate's poems or Chaucer's,
like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and
compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he
knew, but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for
news from London or piecing out from his mother's gossip some country
tragedy of love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story
was laid before him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would
remember some description or saying which bore upon the present
moment and fixed it, or some string of words would charm him, and
putting aside the pressure of the moment, he would hasten home to sit
in his chair and learn the end of the story.

To learn the end of the story--Chaucer can still make us wish to
do that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller's gift, which is
almost the rarest gift among writers at the present day. Nothing
happens to us as it did to our ancestors; events are seldom
important; if we recount them, we do not really believe in them; we
have perhaps things of greater interest to say, and for these reasons
natural story-tellers like Mr. Garnett, whom we must distinguish from
self-conscious storytellers like Mr. Masefield, have become rare. For
the story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell
his story craftily, without undue stress or excitement, or we shall
swallow it whole and jumble the parts together; he must let us stop,
give us time to think and look about us, yet always be persuading us
to move on. Chaucer was helped to this to some extent by the time of
his birth; and in addition he had another advantage over the moderns
which will never come the way of English poets again. England was an
unspoilt country. His eyes rested on a virgin land, all unbroken
grass and wood except for the small towns and an occasional castle in
the building. No villa roofs peered through Kentish tree-tops; no
factory chimney smoked on the hill-side. The state of the country,
considering how poets go to Nature, how they use her for their images
and their contrasts even when they do not describe her directly, is a
matter of some importance. Her cultivation or her savagery influences
the poet far more profoundly than the prose writer. To the modern
poet, with Birmingham, Manchester, and London the size they are, the
country is the sanctuary of moral excellence in contrast with the
town which is the sink of vice. It is a retreat, the haunt of modesty
and virtue, where men go to hide and moralise. There is something
morbid, as if shrinking from human contact, in the nature worship of
Wordsworth, still more in the microscopic devotion which Tennyson
lavished upon the petals of roses and the buds of lime trees. But
these were great poets. In their hands, the country was no mere
jeweller's shop, or museum of curious objects to be described, even
more curiously, in words. Poets of smaller gift, since the view is so
much spoilt, and the garden or the meadow must replace the barren
heath and the precipitous mountain-side, are now confined to little
landscapes, to birds' nests, to acorns with every wrinkle drawn to
the life. The wider landscape is lost.

But to Chaucer the country was too large and too wild to be
altogether agreeable. He turned instinctively, as if he had painful
experience of their nature, from tempests and rocks to the bright May
day and the jocund landscape, from the harsh and mysterious to the
gay and definite. Without possessing a tithe of the virtuosity in
word-painting which is the modern inheritance, he could give, in a
few words, or even, when we come to look, without a single word of
direct description, the sense of the open air.

And se the fresshe floures how they sprynge

--that is enough.

Nature, uncompromising, untamed, was no looking-glass for happy
faces, or confessor of unhappy souls. She was herself; sometimes,
therefore, disagreeable enough and plain, but always in Chaucer's
pages with the hardness and the freshness of an actual presence.
Soon, however, we notice something of greater importance than the gay
and picturesque appearance of the mediaeval world--the solidity which
plumps it out, the conviction which animates the characters. There is
immense variety in the Canterbury Tales, and yet, persisting
underneath, one consistent type. Chaucer has his world; he has his
young men; he has his young women. If one met them straying in
Shakespeare's world one would know them to be Chaucer's, not
Shakespeare's. He wants to describe a girl, and this is what she
looks like:

Then he goes on to develop her; she was a girl, a virgin, cold in
her virginity:

I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
And noght to been a wyf and be with childe.

Next he bethinks him how

Discreet she was in answering alway;
And though she had been as wise as Pallas
No countrefeted termes hadde she
To seme wys; but after hir degree
She spak, and alle hir wordes more and lesse
Souninge in vertu and in gentillesse.

Each of these quotations, in fact, comes from a different Tale,
but they are parts, one feels, of the same personage, whom he had in
mind, perhaps unconsciously, when he thought of a young girl, and for
this reason, as she goes in and out of the Canterbury Tales
bearing different names, she has a stability which is only to be
found where the poet has made up his mind about young women, of
course, but also about the world they live in, its end, its nature,
and his own craft and technique, so that his mind is free to apply
its force fully to its object. It does not occur to him that his
Griselda might be improved or altered. There is no blur about her, no
hesitation; she proves nothing; she is content to be herself. Upon
her, therefore, the mind can rest with that unconscious ease which
allows it, from hints and suggestions, to endow her with many more
qualities than are actually referred to. Such is the power of
conviction, a rare gift, a gift shared in our day by Joseph Conrad in
his earlier novels, and a gift of supreme importance, for upon it the
whole weight of the building depends. Once believe in Chaucer's young
men and women and we have no need of preaching or protest. We know
what he finds good, what evil; the less said the better. Let him get
on with his story, paint knights and squires, good women and bad,
cooks, shipmen, priests, and we will supply the landscape, give his
society its belief, its standing towards life and death, and make of
the journey to Canterbury a spiritual pilgrimage.

This simple faithfulness to his own conceptions was easier then
than now in one respect at least, for Chaucer could write frankly
where we must either say nothing or say it slyly. He could sound
every note in the language instead of finding a great many of the
best gone dumb from disuse, and thus, when struck by daring fingers,
giving off a loud discordant jangle out of keeping with the rest.
Much of Chaucer--a few lines perhaps in each of the Tales--is
improper and gives us as we read it the strange sensation of being
naked to the air after being muffled in old clothing. And, as a
certain kind of humour depends upon being able to speak without
self-consciousness of the parts and functions of the body, so with
the advent of decency literature lost the use of one of its limbs. It
lost its power to create the Wife of Bath, Juliet's nurse, and their
recognisable though already colourless relation, Moll Flanders.
Sterne, from fear of coarseness, is forced into indecency. He must be
witty, not humorous; he must hint instead of speaking outright. Nor
can we believe, with Mr. Joyce's Ulysses before us, that
laughter of the old kind will ever be heard again.

But, lord Christ! When that it remembreth me
Up-on my yowthe, and on my Iolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote.
Unto this day it doth myn herte bote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.

The sound of that old woman's voice is still.

But there is another and more important reason for the surprising
brightness, the still effective merriment of the Canterbury
Tales. Chaucer was a poet; but he never flinched from the life
that was being lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with
its straw, its dung, its cocks and its hens, is not (we have come to
think) a poetic subject; poets seem either to rule out the farmyard
entirely or to require that it shall be a farmyard in Thessaly and
its pigs of mythological origin. But Chaucer says outright:

Three large sowes hadde she, and namo,
Three kyn, and eek a sheep that highte Malle;

or again,

A yard she hadde, enclosed al aboute
With stikkes, and a drye ditch with-oute.

He is unabashed and unafraid. He will always get close up to his
object--an old man's chin--

With thikke bristles of his berde unsofte,
Lyk to the skin of houndfish, sharp as brere;

or an old man's neck--

The slakke skin aboute his nekke shaketh
Whyl that he sang;

and he will tell you what his characters wore, how they looked,
what they ate and drank, as if poetry could handle the common facts
of this very moment of Tuesday, the sixteenth day of April, 1387,
without dirtying her hands. If he withdraws to the time of the Greeks
or the Romans, it is only that his story leads him there. He has no
desire to wrap himself round in antiquity, to take refuge in age, or
to shirk the associations of common grocer's English.

Therefore when we say that we know the end of the journey, it is
hard to quote the particular lines from which we take our knowledge.
Chaucer fixed his eyes upon the road before him, not upon the world
to come. He was little given to abstract contemplation. He
deprecated, with peculiar archness, any competition with the scholars
and divines:

The answere of this I lete to divynis,
But wel I woot, that in this world grey pyne is.
What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in the colde grave
Allone, withouten any companye,
O cruel goddes, that governe
This world with binding of your worde eterne,
And wryten in the table of athamaunt
Your parlement, and your eterne graunt,
What is mankinde more un-to yow holde
Than is the sheepe, that rouketh in the folde?

Questions press upon him; he asks them, but he is too true a poet
to answer them; he leaves them unsolved, uncramped by the solution of
the moment, and thus fresh for the generations that come after him.
In his life, too, it would be impossible to write him down a man of
this party or of that, a democrat or an aristocrat. He was a staunch
churchman, but he laughed at priests. He was an able public servant
and a courtier, but his views upon sexual morality were extremely
lax. He sympathised with poverty, but did nothing to improve the lot
of the poor. It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed
or one stone set upon another because of anything that Chaucer said
or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbing morality at every
pore. For among writers there are two kinds: there are the priests
who take you by the hand and lead you straight up to the mystery;
there are the laymen who imbed their doctrines in flesh and blood and
make a complete model of the world without excluding the bad or
laying stress upon the good. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley are
among the priests; they give us text after text to be hung upon the
wall, saying after saying to be laid upon the heart like an amulet
against disaster--

Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone

He prayeth best that loveth best
All things both great and small

--such lines of exhortation and command spring to memory
instantly. But Chaucer lets us go our ways doing the ordinary things
with the ordinary people. His morality lies in the way men and women
behave to each other. We see them eating, drinking, laughing, and
making love, and come to feel without a word being said what their
standards are and so are steeped through and through with their
morality. There can be no more forcible preaching than this where all
actions and passions are represented, and instead of being solemnly
exhorted we are left to stray and stare and make out a meaning for
ourselves. It is the morality of ordinary intercourse, the morality
of the novel, which parents and librarians rightly judge to be far
more persuasive than the morality of poetry.

And so, when we shut Chaucer, we feel that without a word being
said the criticism is complete; what we are saying, thinking,
reading, doing, has been commented upon. Nor are we left merely with
the sense, powerful though that is, of having been in good company
and got used to the ways of good society. For as we have jogged
through the real, the unadorned country-side, with first one good
fellow cracking his joke or singing his song and then another, we
know that though this world resembles, it is not in fact our daily
world. It is the world of poetry. Everything happens here more
quickly and mere intensely, and with better order than in life or in
prose; there is a formal elevated dullness which is part of the
incantation of poetry; there are lines speaking half a second in
advance what we were about to say, as if we read our thoughts before
words cumbered them; and lines which we go back to read again with
that heightened quality, that enchantment which keeps them glittering
in the mind long afterwards. And the whole is held in its place, and
its variety and divagations ordered by the power which is among the
most impressive of all--the shaping power, the architect's power. It
is the peculiarity of Chaucer, however, that though we feel at once
this quickening, this enchantment, we cannot prove it by quotation.
From most poets quotation is easy and obvious; some metaphor suddenly
flowers; some passage breaks off from the rest. But Chaucer is very
equal, very even-paced, very unmetaphorical. If we take six or seven
lines in the hope that the quality will be contained in them it has
escaped.

My lord, ye woot that in my fadres place,
Ye dede me strepe out of my povre wede,
And richely me cladden, o your grace
To yow broghte I noght elles, out of drede,
But feyth and nakedness and maydenhede.

In its place that seemed not only memorable and moving but fit to
set beside striking beauties. Cut out and taken separately it appears
ordinary and quiet. Chaucer, it seems, has some art by which the most
ordinary words and the simplest feelings when laid side by side make
each other shine; when separated, lose their lustre. Thus the
pleasure he gives us is different from the pleasure that other poets
give us, because it is more closely connected with what we have
ourselves felt or observed. Eating, drinking, and fine weather, the
May, cocks and hens, millers, old peasant women, flowers--there is a
special stimulus in seeing all these common things so arranged that
they affect us as poetry affects us, and are yet bright, sober,
precise as we see them out of doors. There is a pungency in this
unfigurative language; a stately and memorable beauty in the undraped
sentences which follow each other like women so slightly veiled that
you see the lines of their bodies as they go--

And she set down hir water pot anon
Biside the threshold in an oxe's stall.

And then, as the procession takes its way, out from behind peeps
the face of Chaucer, in league with all foxes, donkeys, and hens, to
mock the pomps and ceremonies of life--witty, intellectual, French,
at the same time based upon a broad bottom of English humour.

So Sir John read his Chaucer in the comfortless room with the wind
blowing and the smoke stinging, and left his father's tombstone
unmade. But no book, no tomb, had power to hold him long. He was one
of those ambiguous characters who haunt the boundary line where one
age merges in another and are not able to inhabit either. At one
moment he was all for buying books cheap; next he was off to France
and told his mother, "My mind is now not most upon books." In his own
house, where his mother Margaret was perpetually making out
inventories or confiding in Gloys the priest, he had no peace or
comfort. There was always reason on her side; she was a brave woman,
for whose sake one must put up with the priest's insolence and choke
down one's rage when the grumbling broke into open abuse, and "Thou
proud priest" and "Thou proud Squire" were bandied angrily about the
room. All this, with the discomforts of life and the weakness of his
own character, drove him to loiter in pleasanter places, to put off
coming, to put off writing, to put off, year after year, the making
of his father's tombstone.

Yet John Paston had now lain for twelve years under the bare
ground. The Prior of Bromholm sent word that the grave-cloth was in
tatters, and he had tried to patch it himself. Worse still, for a
proud woman like Margaret Paston, the country people murmured at the
Pastons' lack of piety, and other families she heard, of no greater
standing than theirs, spent money in pious restoration in the very
church where her husband lay unremembered. At last, turning from
tournaments and Chaucer and Mistress Anne Hault, Sir John bethought
him of a piece of cloth of gold which had been used to cover his
father's hearse and might now be sold to defray the expenses of his
tomb. Margaret had it in safe keeping; she had hoarded it and cared
for it, and spent twenty marks on its repair. She grudged it; but
there was no help for it. She sent it him, still distrusting his
intentions or his power to put them into effect. "If you sell it to
any other use," she wrote, "by my troth I shall never trust you while
I live."

But this final act, like so many that Sir John had undertaken in
the course of his life, was left undone. A dispute with the Duke of
Suffolk in the year 1479 made it necessary for him to visit London in
spite of the epidemic of sickness that was abroad; and there, in
dirty lodgings, alone, busy to the end with quarrels, clamorous to
the end for money, Sir John died and was buried at Whitefriars in
London. He left a natural daughter; he left a considerable number of
books; but his father's tomb was still unmade.

The four thick volumes of the Paston letters, however, swallow up
this frustrated man as the sea absorbs a raindrop. For, like all
collections of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care
overmuch for the fortunes of individuals. The family will go on,
whether Sir John lives or dies. It is their method to heap up in
mounds of insignificant and often dismal dust the innumerable
trivialities of daily life, as it grinds itself out, year after year.
And then suddenly they blaze up; the day shines out, complete, alive,
before our eyes. It is early morning, and strange men have been
whispering among the women as they milk. It is evening, and there in
the churchyard Warne's wife bursts out against old Agnes Paston: "All
the devils of Hell draw her soul to Hell." Now it is the autumn in
Norfolk, and Cecily Dawne comes whining to Sir John for clothing.
"Moreover, Sir, liketh it your mastership to understand that winter
and cold weather draweth nigh and I have few clothes but of your
gift." There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by
hour.

But in all this there is no writing for writing's sake; no use of
the pen to convey pleasure or amusement or any of the million shades
of endearment and intimacy which have filled so many English letters
since. Only occasionally, under stress of anger for the most part,
does Margaret Paston quicken into some shrewd saw or solemn curse.
"Men cut large thongs here out of other men's leather. . . . We beat
the bushes and other men have the birds. . . . Haste reweth . . .
which is to my heart a very spear." That is her eloquence and that
her anguish. Her sons, it is true, bend their pens more easily to
their will. They jest rather stiffly; they hint rather clumsily; they
make a little scene like a rough puppet show of the old priest's
anger and give a phrase or two directly as they were spoken in
person. But when Chaucer lived he must have heard this very language,
matter of fact, unmetaphorical, far better fitted for narrative than
for analysis, capable of religious solemnity or of broad humour, but
very stiff material to put on the lips of men and women accosting
each other face to face. In short, it is easy to see, from the Paston
letters, why Chaucer wrote not Lear or Romeo and
Juliet, but the Canterbury Tales.

Sir John was buried; and John the younger brother succeeded in his
turn. The Paston letters go on; life at Paston continues much the
same as before. Over it all broods a sense of discomfort and
nakedness; of unwashed limbs thrust into splendid clothing; of
tapestry blowing on the draughty walls; of the bedroom with its
privy; of winds sweeping straight over land unmitigated by hedge or
town; of Caister Castle covering with solid stone six acres of
ground, and of the plain-faced Pastons indefatigably accumulating
wealth, treading out the roads of Norfolk, and persisting with an
obstinate courage which does them infinite credit in furnishing the
bareness of England.

For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our
ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys,
since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we
ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign
people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue
but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is
it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for
ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of
the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends,
with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall
say?

It is obvious in the first place that Greek literature is the
impersonal literature. Those few hundred years that separate John
Paston from Plato, Norwich from Athens, make a chasm which the vast
tide of European chatter can never succeed in crossing. When we read
Chaucer, we are floated up to him insensibly on the current of our
ancestors' lives, and later, as records increase and memories
lengthen, there is scarcely a figure which has not its nimbus of
association, its life and letters, its wife and family, its house,
its character, its happy or dismal catastrophe. But the Greeks remain
in a fastness of their own. Fate has been kind there too. She has
preserved them from vulgarity. Euripides was eaten by dogs; Aeschylus
killed by a stone; Sappho leapt from a cliff. We know no more of them
than that. We have their poetry, and that is all.

But that is not, and perhaps never can be, wholly true. Pick up
any play by Sophocles, read--

Son of him who led our hosts at Troy of old, son of Agamemnon,

and at once the mind begins to fashion itself surroundings. It
makes some background, even of the most provisional sort, for
Sophocles; it imagines some village, in a remote part of the country,
near the sea. Even nowadays such villages are to be found in the
wilder parts of England, and as we enter them we can scarcely help
feeling that here, in this cluster of cottages, cut off from rail or
city, are all the elements of a perfect existence. Here is the
Rectory; here the Manor house, the farm and the cottages; the church
for worship, the club for meeting, the cricket field for play. Here
life is simply sorted out into its main elements. Each man and woman
has his work; each works for the health or happiness of others. And
here, in this little community, characters become part of the common
stock; the eccentricities of the clergyman are known; the great
ladies' defects of temper; the blacksmith's feud with the milkman,
and the loves and matings of the boys and girls. Here life has cut
the same grooves for centuries; customs have arisen; legends have
attached themselves to hilltops and solitary trees, and the village
has its history, its festivals, and its rivalries.

It is the climate that is impossible. If we try to think of
Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the
thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must
imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and
greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine
weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of
doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small
incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and
become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering,
laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern
races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low
half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people
accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

That is the quality that first strikes us in Greek literature, the
lightning-quick, sneering, out-of-doors manner. It is apparent in the
most august as well as in the most trivial places. Queens and
Princesses in this very tragedy by Sophocles stand at the door
bandying words like village women, with a tendency, as one might
expect, to rejoice in language, to split phrases into slices, to be
intent on verbal victory. The humour of the people was not
good-natured like that of our postmen and cab-drivers. The taunts of
men lounging at the street corners had something cruel in them as
well as witty. There is a cruelty in Greek tragedy which is quite
unlike our English brutality. Is not Pentheus, for example, that
highly respectable man, made ridiculous in the Bacchae before
he is destroyed? In fact, of course, these Queens and Princesses were
out of doors, with the bees buzzing past them, shadows crossing them,
and the wind taking their draperies. They were speaking to an
enormous audience rayed round them on one of those brilliant southern
days when the sun is so hot and yet the air so exciting. The poet,
therefore, had to bethink him, not of some theme which could be read
for hours by people in privacy, but of something emphatic, familiar,
brief, that would carry, instantly and directly, to an audience of
seventeen thousand people perhaps, with ears and eyes eager and
attentive, with bodies whose muscles would grow stiff if they sat too
long without diversion. Music and dancing he would need, and
naturally would choose one of those legends, like our Tristram and
Iseult, which are known to every one in outline, so that a great fund
of emotion is ready prepared, but can be stressed in a new place by
each new poet.

Sophocles would take the old story of Electra, for instance, but
would at once impose his stamp upon it. Of that, in spite of our
weakness and distortion, what remains visible to us? That his genius
was of the extreme kind in the first place; that he chose a design
which, if it failed, would show its failure in gashes and ruin, not
in the gentle blurring of some insignificant detail; which, if it
succeeded, would cut each stroke to the bone, would stamp each
fingerprint in marble. His Electra stands before us like a figure so
tightly bound that she can only move an inch this way, an inch that.
But each movement must tell to the utmost, or, bound as she is,
denied the relief of all hints, repetitions, suggestions, she will be
nothing but a dummy, tightly bound. Her words in crisis are, as a
matter of fact, bare; mere cries of despair, joy, hate

But these cries give angle and outline to the play. It is thus,
with a thousand differences of degree, that in English literature
Jane Austen shapes a novel. There comes a moment--"I will dance with
you," says Emma--which rises higher than the rest, which, though not
eloquent in itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty of
language, has the whole weight of the book behind it. In Jane Austen,
too, we have the same sense, though the ligatures are much less
tight, that her figures are bound, and restricted to a few definite
movements. She, too, in her modest, everyday prose, chose the
dangerous art where one slip means death.

But it is not so easy to decide what it is that gives these cries
of Electra in her anguish their power to cut and wound and excite. It
is partly that we know her, that we have picked up from little turns
and twists of the dialogue hints of her character, of her appearance,
which, characteristically, she neglected; of something suffering in
her, outraged and stimulated to its utmost stretch of capacity, yet,
as she herself knows ("my behaviour is unseemly and becomes me ill"),
blunted and debased by the horror of her position, an unwed girl made
to witness her mother's vileness and denounce it in loud, almost
vulgar, clamour to the world at large. It is partly, too, that we
know in the same way that Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess.
"[Greek text-2]" she says--"there is a strange
power in motherhood". It is no murderess, violent and unredeemed,
whom Orestes kills within the house, and Electra bids him utterly
destroy--"Strike again." No; the men and women standing out in the
sunlight before the audience on the hill-side were alive enough,
subtle enough, not mere figures, or plaster casts of human
beings.

Yet it is not because we can analyse them into feelings that they
impress us. In six pages of Proust we can find more complicated and
varied emotions than in the whole of the Electra. But in the
Electra or in the Antigone we are impressed by
something different, by something perhaps more impressive--by heroism
itself, by fidelity itself. In spite of the labour and the difficulty
it is this that draws us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the
permanent, the original human being is to be found there. Violent
emotions are needed to rouse him into action, but when thus stirred
by death, by betrayal, by some other primitive calamity, Antigone and
Ajax and Electra behave in the way in which we should behave thus
struck down; the way in which everybody has always behaved; and thus
we understand them more easily and more directly than we understand
the characters in the Canterbury Tales. These are the
originals, Chaucer's the varieties of the human species.

It is true, of course, that these types of the original man or
woman, these heroic Kings, these faithful daughters, these tragic
Queens who stalk through the ages always planting their feet in the
same places, twitching their robes with the same gestures, from habit
not from impulse, are among the greatest bores and the most
demoralising companions in the world. The plays of Addison, Voltaire,
and a host of others are there to prove it. But encounter them in
Greek. Even in Sophocles, whose reputation for restraint and mastery
has filtered down to us from the scholars, they are decided,
ruthless, direct. A fragment of their speech broken off would, we
feel, colour oceans and oceans of the respectable drama. Here we meet
them before their emotions have been worn into uniformity. Here we
listen to the nightingale whose song echoes through English
literature singing in her own Greek tongue. For the first time
Orpheus with his lute makes men and beasts follow him. Their voices
ring out clear and sharp; we see the hairy, tawny bodies at play in
the sunlight among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on granite
plinths in the pale corridors of the British Museum. And then
suddenly, in the midst of all this sharpness and compression,
Electra, as if she swept her veil over her face and forbade us to
think of her any more, speaks of that very nightingale: "that bird
distraught with grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah, queen of sorrow,
Niobe, thee I deem divine--thee; who evermore weepest in thy rocky
tomb."

And as she silences her own complaint, she perplexes us again with
the insoluble question of poetry and its nature, and why, as she
speaks thus, her words put on the assurance of immortality. For they
are Greek; we cannot tell how they sounded; they ignore the obvious
sources of excitement; they owe nothing of their effect to any
extravagance of expression, and certainly they throw no light upon
the speaker's character or the writer's. But they remain, something
that has been stated and must eternally endure.

Yet in a play how dangerous this poetry, this lapse from the
particular to the general must of necessity be, with the actors
standing there in person, with their bodies and their faces passively
waiting to be made use of! For this reason the later plays of
Shakespeare, where there is more of poetry than of action, are better
read than seen, better understood by leaving out the actual body than
by having the body, with all its associations and movements, visible
to the eye. The intolerable restrictions of the drama could be
loosened, however, if a means could be found by which what was
general and poetic, comment, not action, could be freed without
interrupting the movement of the whole. It is this that the choruses
supply; the old men or women who take no active part in the drama,
the undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in the pauses of the
wind; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet to speak himself
or supply, by contrast, another side to his conception. Always in
imaginative literature, where characters speak for themselves and the
author has no part, the need of that voice is making itself felt. For
though Shakespeare (unless we consider that his fools and madmen
supply the part) dispensed with the chorus, novelists are always
devising some substitute--Thackeray speaking in his own person,
Fielding coming out and addressing the world before his curtain
rises. So to grasp the meaning of the play the chorus is of the
utmost importance. One must be able to pass easily into those
ecstasies, those wild and apparently irrelevant utterances, those
sometimes obvious and commonplace statements, to decide their
relevance or irrelevance, and give them their relation to the play as
a whole.

We must "be able to pass easily"; but that of course is exactly
what we cannot do. For the most part the choruses, with all their
obscurities, must be spelt out and their symmetry mauled. But we can
guess that Sophocles used them not to express something outside the
action of the play, but to sing the praises of some virtue, or the
beauties of some place mentioned in it. He selects what he wishes to
emphasize and sings of white Colonus and its nightingale, or of love
unconquered in fight. Lovely, lofty, and serene, his choruses grow
naturally out of his situations, and change, not the point of view,
but the mood. In Euripides, however, the situations are not contained
within themselves; they give off an atmosphere of doubt, of
suggestion, of questioning; but if we look to the choruses to make
this plain we are often baffled rather than instructed. At once in
the Bacchae we are in the world of psychology and doubt; the
world where the mind twists facts and changes them and makes the
familiar aspects of life appear new and questionable. What is
Bacchus, and who are the Gods, and what is man's duty to them, and
what the rights of his subtle brain? To these questions the chorus
makes no reply, or replies mockingly, or speaks darkly as if the
straitness of the dramatic form had tempted Euripides to violate it,
in order to relieve his mind of its weight. Time is so short and I
have so much to say, that unless you will allow me to place together
two apparently unrelated statements and trust to you to pull them
together, you must be content with a mere skeleton of the play I
might have given you. Such is the argument. Euripides therefore
suffers less than Sophocles and less than Aeschylus from being read
privately in a room, and not seen on a hill-side in the sunshine. He
can be acted in the mind; he can comment upon the questions of the
moment; more than the others he will vary in popularity from age to
age.

If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the figures
themselves, and in Euripides is to be retrieved from flashes of
poetry and questions far flung and unanswered, Aeschylus makes these
little dramas (the Agamemnon has 1663 lines; Lear about
2600) tremendous by stretching every phrase to the utmost, by sending
them floating forth in metaphors, by bidding them rise up and stalk
eyeless and majestic through the scene. To understand him it is not
so necessary to understand Greek as to understand poetry. It is
necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the
support of words which Shakespeare also asks of us. For words, when
opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown
astray, and only by collecting in companies convey the meaning which
each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting them in a
rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what
they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other
words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry;
we cannot know exactly what it means. Take this from the
Agamemnon for instance--

The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning
which in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in
our minds without words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered
as he was by prose and as we are by translation) leads us to by some
astonishing run up the scale of emotions and points at but cannot
indicate; the meaning that Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.

Aeschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words
that people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in
some mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like
Euripides will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little
space, as a small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the
bold and running use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the
thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into
his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to
illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make
splendid.

For none of these dramatists had the licence which belongs to the
novelist, and, in some degree, to all writers of printed books, of
modelling their meaning with an infinity of slight touches which can
only be properly applied by reading quietly, carefully, and sometimes
two or three times over. Every sentence had to explode on striking
the ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might then descend,
and however enigmatic might their final purport be. No splendour or
richness of metaphor could have saved the Agamemnon if either
images or allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got
between us and the naked cry

But winter fell on these villages, darkness and extreme cold
descended on the hill-side. There must have been some place indoors
where men could retire, both in the depths of winter and in the
summer heats, where they could sit and drink, where they could lie
stretched at their ease, where they could talk. It is Plato, of
course, who reveals the life indoors, and describes how, when a party
of friends met and had eaten not at all luxuriously and drunk a
little wine, some handsome boy ventured a question, or quoted an
opinion, and Socrates took it up, fingered it, turned it round,
looked at it this way and that, swiftly stripped it of its
inconsistencies and falsities and brought the whole company by
degrees to gaze with him at the truth. It is an exhausting process;
to concentrate painfully upon the exact meaning of words; to judge
what each admission involves; to follow intently, yet critically, the
dwindling and changing of opinion as it hardens and intensifies into
truth. Are pleasure and good the same? Can virtue be taught? Is
virtue knowledge? The tired or feeble mind may easily lapse as the
remorseless questioning proceeds; but no one, however weak, can fail,
even if he does not learn more from Plato, to love knowledge better.
For as the argument mounts from step to step, Protagoras yielding,
Socrates pushing on, what matters is not so much the end we reach as
our manner of reaching it. That all can feel--the indomitable
honesty, the courage, the love of truth which draw Socrates and us in
his wake to the summit where, if we too may stand for a moment, it is
to enjoy the greatest felicity of which we are capable.

Yet such an expression seems ill fitted to describe the state of
mind of a student to whom, after painful argument, the truth has been
revealed. But truth is various; truth comes to us in different
disguises; it is not with the intellect alone that we perceive it. It
is a winter's night; the tables are spread at Agathon's house; the
girl is playing the flute; Socrates has washed himself and put on
sandals; he has stopped in the hall; he refuses to move when they
send for him. Now Socrates has done; he is bantering Alcibiades;
Alcibiades takes a fillet and binds it round "this wonderful fellow's
head". He praises Socrates. "For he cares not for mere beauty, but
despises more than any one can imagine all external possessions,
whether it be beauty or wealth or glory, or any other thing for which
the multitude felicitates the possessor. He esteems these things and
us who honour them, as nothing, and lives among men, making all the
objects of their admiration the playthings of his irony. But I know
not if any one of you has ever seen the divine images which are
within, when he has been opened and is serious. I have seen them, and
they are so supremely beautiful, so golden, divine, and wonderful,
that everything which Socrates commands surely ought to be obeyed
even like the voice of a God." All this flows over the arguments of
Plato--laughter and movement; people getting up and going out; the
hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes cracked; the dawn rising.
Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our
faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the
frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be
quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine,
and sleep instead of talking through the long winter's night? It is
not to the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude
that we are to turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who
practises the art of living to the best advantage, so that nothing is
stunted but some things are permanently more valuable than
others.

So in these dialogues we are made to seek truth with every part of
us. For Plato, of course, had the dramatic genius. It is by means of
that, by an art which conveys in a sentence or two the setting and
the atmosphere, and then with perfect adroitness insinuates itself
into the coils of the argument without losing its liveliness and
grace, and then contracts to bare statement, and then, mounting,
expands and soars in that higher air which is generally reached only
by the more extreme measures of poetry--it is this art which plays
upon us in so many ways at once and brings us to an exultation of
mind which can only be reached when all the powers are called upon to
contribute their energy to the whole.

But we must beware. Socrates did not care for "mere beauty", by
which he meant, perhaps, beauty as ornament. A people who judged as
much as the Athenians did by ear, sitting out-of-doors at the play or
listening to argument in the market-place, were far less apt than we
are to break off sentences and appreciate them apart from the
context. For them there were no Beauties of Hardy, Beauties of
Meredith, Sayings from George Eliot. The writer had to think more of
the whole and less of the detail. Naturally, living in the open, it
was not the lip or the eye that struck them, but the carriage of the
body and the proportions of its parts. Thus when we quote and extract
we do the Greeks more damage than we do the English. There is a
bareness and abruptness in their literature which grates upon a taste
accustomed to the intricacy and finish of printed books. We have to
stretch our minds to grasp a whole devoid of the prettiness of detail
or the emphasis of eloquence. Accustomed to look directly and largely
rather than minutely and aslant, it was safe for them to step into
the thick of emotions which blind and bewilder an age like our own.
In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be
broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow
ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. The only poets who spoke
to the purpose spoke in the sidelong, satiric manner of Wilfrid Owen
and Siegfried Sassoon. It was not possible for them to be direct
without being clumsy; or to speak simply of emotion without being
sentimental. But the Greeks could say, as if for the first time, "Yet
being dead they have not died". They could say, "If to die nobly is
the chief part of excellence, to us out of all men Fortune gave this
lot; for hastening to set a crown of freedom on Greece we lie
possessed of praise that grows not old". They could march straight
up, with their eyes open; and thus fearlessly approached, emotions
stand still and suffer themselves to be looked at.

But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek
as it was written when we say this? When we read these few words cut
on a tombstone, a stanza in a chorus, the end or the opening of a
dialogue of Plato's, a fragment of Sappho, when we bruise our minds
upon some tremendous metaphor in the Agamemnon instead of
stripping the branch of its flowers instantly as we do in reading
Lear--are we not reading wrongly? losing our sharp sight in
the haze of associations? reading into Greek poetry not what they
have but what we lack? Does not the whole of Greece heap itself
behind every line of its literature? They admit us to a vision of the
earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the maturity, tried but
unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a vigour which
pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the young. The
nightingale has only to be named by Sophocles and she sings; the
grove has only to be called [Greek text-5],
"untrodden", and we imagine the twisted branches and the purple
violets. Back and back we are drawn to steep ourselves in what,
perhaps, is only an image of the reality, not the reality itself, a
summer's day imagined in the heart of a northern winter. Chief among
these sources of glamour and perhaps misunderstanding is the
language. We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in
Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now
harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot
pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which a
phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless, it is the
language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which
perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the
expression. Shelley takes twenty-one words in English to translate
thirteen words of Greek--[Greek text-6] (". . .
for everyone, even if before he were ever so undisciplined, becomes a
poet as soon as he is touched by love").

Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm.
Then, spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly,
dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled. Then there are the words
themselves which, in so many instances, we have made expressive to us
of our own emotions, [Greek text-7]--to take the
first that come to hand; so clear, so hard, so intense, that to speak
plainly yet fittingly without blurring the outline or clouding the
depths, Greek is the only expression. It is useless, then, to read
Greek in translations. Translators can but offer us a vague
equivalent; their language is necessarily full of echoes and
associations. Professor Mackail says "wan", and the age of
Burne-Jones and Morris is at once evoked. Nor can the subtler stress,
the flight and the fall of the words, be kept even by the most
skilful of scholars--

Further, in reckoning the doubts and difficulties there is this
important problem--Where are we to laugh in reading Greek? There is a
passage in the Odyssey where laughter begins to steal upon us,
but if Homer were looking we should probably think it better to
control our merriment. To laugh instantly it is almost necessary
(though Aristophanes may supply us with an exception) to laugh in
English. Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the
body. When we laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with
the body of that burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the
village green. The French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive
physically from so different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading
Homer, to make sure that they are laughing in the right place, and
the pause is fatal. Thus humour is the first of the gifts to perish
in a foreign tongue, and when we turn from Greek to English
literature it seems, after a long silence, as if our great age were
ushered in by a burst of laughter.

These are all difficulties, sources of misunderstanding, of
distorted and romantic, of servile and snobbish passion. Yet even for
the unlearned some certainties remain. Greek is the impersonal
literature; it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no
schools; no forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process
working in many men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately
at last in one. Again, there is always about Greek literature that
air of vigour which permeates an "age", whether it is the age of
Aeschylus, or Racine, or Shakespeare. One generation at least in that
fortunate time is blown on to be writers to the extreme; to attain
that unconsciousness which means that the consciousness is stimulated
to the highest extent; to surpass the limits of small triumphs and
tentative experiments. Thus we have Sappho with her constellations of
adjectives; Plato daring extravagant flights of poetry in the midst
of prose; Thucydides, constricted and contracted; Sophocles gliding
like a shoal of trout smoothly and quietly, apparently motionless,
and then, with a flicker of fins, off and away; while in the
Odyssey we have what remains the triumph of narrative, the
clearest and at the same time the most romantic story of the fortunes
of men and women.

The Odyssey is merely a story of adventure, the instinctive
story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may begin it, reading
quickly in the spirit of children wanting amusement to find out what
happens next. But here is nothing immature; here are full-grown
people, crafty, subtle, and passionate. Nor is the world itself a
small one, since the sea which separates island from island has to be
crossed by little hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of
the sea-gulls. It is true that the islands are not thickly populated,
and the people, though everything is made by hands, are not closely
kept at work. They have had time to develop a very dignified, a very
stately society, with an ancient tradition of manners behind it,
which makes every relation at once orderly, natural, and full of
reserve. Penelope crosses the room; Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa
washes her linen; and their actions seem laden with beauty because
they do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their
possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all
those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that
is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines,
meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of
a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do
not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the
shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there
they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of
the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its
consolations, of our own age.

These magnificent volumes1 are not often, perhaps, read
through. Part of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not
so much a book as a great bundle of commodities loosely tied
together, an emporium, a lumber room strewn with ancient sacks,
obsolete nautical instruments, huge bales of wool, and little bags of
rubies and emeralds. One is for ever untying this packet here,
sampling that heap over there, wiping the dust off some vast map of
the world, and sitting down in semi-darkness to snuff the strange
smells of silks and leathers and ambergris, while outside tumble the
huge waves of the uncharted Elizabethan sea.

1Hakluyt's Collection of the Early Voyages,
Travels, and Discoveries of the English Nation, five volumes,
4to, 1810.

For this jumble of seeds, silks, unicorns' horns, elephants'
teeth, wool, common stones, turbans, and bars of gold, these odds and
ends of priceless value and complete worthlessness, were the fruit of
innumerable voyages, traffics, and discoveries to unknown lands in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The expeditions were manned by "apt
young men" from the West country, and financed in part by the great
Queen herself. The ships, says Froude, were no bigger than modern
yachts. There in the river by Greenwich the fleet lay gathered, close
to the Palace. "The Privy council looked out of the windows of the
court . . . the ships thereupon discharge their ordnance . . . and
the mariners they shouted in such sort that the sky rang again with
the noise thereof." Then, as the ships swung down the tide, one
sailor after another walked the hatches, climbed the shrouds, stood
upon the mainyards to wave his friends a last farewell. Many would
come back no more. For directly England and the coast of France were
beneath the horizon, the ships sailed into the unfamiliar; the air
had its voices, the sea its lions and serpents, its evaporations of
fire and tumultuous whirlpools. But God too was very close; the
clouds but sparely hid the divinity Himself; the limbs of Satan were
almost visible. Familiarly the English sailors pitted their God
against the God of the Turks, who "can speake never a word for
dulnes, much lesse can he helpe them in such an extremitie. . . . But
howsoever their God behaved himself, our God showed himself a God
indeed. . . ." God was as near by sea as by land, said Sir Humfrey
Gilbert, riding through the storm. Suddenly one light disappeared;
Sir Humfrey Gilbert had gone beneath the waves; when morning came,
they sought his ship in vain. Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed to discover
the North-West Passage and made no return. The Earl of Cumberland's
men, hung up by adverse winds off the coast of Cornwall for a
fortnight, licked the muddy water off the deck in agony. And
sometimes a ragged and worn-out man came knocking at the door of an
English country house and claimed to be the boy who had left it years
ago to sail the seas. "Sir William his father, and my lady his mother
knew him not to be their son, until they found a secret mark, which
was a wart upon one of his knees." But he had with him a black stone,
veined with gold, or an ivory tusk, or a silver ingot, and urged on
the village youth with talk of gold strewn over the land as stones
are strewn in the fields of England. One expedition might fail, but
what if the passage to the fabled land of uncounted riches lay only a
little farther up the coast? What if the known world was only the
prelude to some more splendid panorama? When, after the long voyage,
the ships dropped anchor in the great river of the Plate and the men
went exploring through the undulating lands, startling grazing herds
of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the trees, they filled
their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds or sand that might
be gold; or sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw, far off, a
string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on their
heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for the
Spanish King.

These are the fine stories used effectively all through the West
country to decoy "the apt young men" lounging by the harbour-side to
leave their nets and fish for gold. But the voyagers were sober
merchants into the bargain, citizens with the good of English trade
and the welfare of English work-people at heart. The captains are
reminded how necessary it is to find a market abroad for English
wool; to discover the herb from which blue dyes are made; above all
to make inquiry as to the methods of producing oil, since all
attempts to make it from radish seed have failed. They are reminded
of the misery of the English poor, whose crimes, brought about by
poverty, make them "daily consumed by the gallows". They are reminded
how the soil of England had been enriched by the discoveries of
travellers in the past; how Dr. Linaker brought seeds of the damask
rose and tulipas, and how beasts and plants and herbs, "without which
our life were to be said barbarous", have all come to England
gradually from abroad. In search of markets and of goods, of the
immortal fame success would bring them, the apt young men set sail
for the North, and were left, a little company of isolated Englishmen
surrounded by snow and the huts of savages, to make what bargains
they could and pick up what knowledge they might before the ships
returned in the summer to fetch them home again. There they endured,
an isolated company, burning on the rim of the dark. One of them,
carrying a charter from his company in London, went inland as far as
Moscow, and there saw the Emperor "sitting in his chair of estate
with his crown on his head, and a staff of goldsmiths' work in his
left hand". All the ceremony that he saw is carefully written out,
and the sight upon which the English merchant first set eyes has the
brilliancy of a Roman vase dug up and stood for a moment in the sun,
until, exposed to the air, seen by millions of eyes, it dulls and
crumbles away. There, all these centuries, on the outskirts of the
world, the glories of Moscow, the glories of Constantinople have
flowered unseen. The Englishman was bravely dressed for the occasion,
led "three fair mastiffs in coats of red cloth", and carried a letter
from Elizabeth "the paper whereof did smell most fragrantly of
camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect musk". And sometimes,
since trophies from the amazing new world were eagerly awaited at
home, together with unicorns' horns and lumps of ambergris and the
fine stories of the engendering of whales and "debates" of elephants
and dragons whose blood, mixed, congealed into vermilion, a living
sample would be sent, a live savage caught somewhere off the coast of
Labrador, taken to England, and shown about like a wild beast. Next
year they brought him back, and took a woman savage on board to keep
him company. When they saw each other they blushed; they blushed
profoundly, but the sailors, though they noted it, knew not why.
Later the two savages set up house together on board ship, she
attending to his wants, he nursing her in sickness. But, as the
sailors noted again, the savages lived together in perfect
chastity.

All this, the new words, the new ideas, the waves, the savages,
the adventures, found their way naturally into the plays which were
being acted on the banks of the Thames. There was an audience quick
to seize upon the coloured and the high-sounding; to associate
those

frigates bottom'd with rich Sethin planks,
Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon,

with the adventures of their own sons and brothers abroad. The
Verneys, for example, had a wild boy who had gone as pirate, turned
Turk, and died out there, sending back to Claydon to be kept as
relics of him some silk, a turban, and a pilgrim's staff. A gulf lay
between the spartan domestic housecraft of the Paston women and the
refined tastes of the Elizabethan Court ladies, who, grown old, says
Harrison, spent their time reading histories, or "writing volumes of
their own, or translating of other men's into our English and Latin
tongue", while the younger ladies played the lute and the citharne
and spent their leisure in the enjoyment of music. Thus, with singing
and with music, springs into existence the characteristic Elizabethan
extravagance; the dolphins and lavoltas of Greene; the hyperbole,
more surprising in a writer so terse and muscular, of Ben Jonson.
Thus we find the whole of Elizabethan literature strewn with gold and
silver; with talk of Guiana's rarities, and references to that
America--"O my America! my new-found-land"--which was not merely a
land on the map, but symbolised the unknown territories of the soul.
So, over the water, the imagination of Montaigne brooded in
fascination upon savages, cannibals, society, and government.

But the mention of Montaigne suggests that though the influence of
the sea and the voyages, of the lumber room crammed with sea beasts
and horns and ivory and old maps and nautical instruments, helped to
inspire the greatest age of English poetry, its effects were by no
means so beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and metre helped the
poets to keep the tumult of their perceptions in order. But the prose
writer, without these restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out
in interminable catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the
convolutions of his own rich draperies. How little Elizabethan prose
was fit for its office, how exquisitely French prose was already
adapted, can be seen by comparing a passage from Sidney's Defense
of Poesie with one from Montaigne's Essays.

He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the
margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness:
but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either
accompanied with, or prepared for the well enchanting Skill of Music,
and with a tale (forsooth) he cometh unto you, with a tale which
holdeth children from play, and old men from the Chimney corner; and
pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from
wickedness to virtue; even as the child is often brought to take most
wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant
taste: which if one should begin to tell them the nature of the
Aloës or Rhubarbarum they should receive, would
sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth, so is it
in men (most of which are childish in the best things, till they be
cradled in their graves) glad they will be to hear the tales of
Hercules. . . .

And so it runs on for seventy-six words more. Sidney's prose is an
uninterrupted monologue, with sudden flashes of felicity and splendid
phrases, which lends itself to lamentations and moralities, to long
accumulations and catalogues, but is never quick, never colloquial,
unable to grasp a thought closely and firmly, or to adapt itself
flexibly and exactly to the chops and changes of the mind. Compared
with this, Montaigne is master of an instrument which knows its own
powers and limitations, and is capable of insinuating itself into
crannies and crevices which poetry can never reach; capable of
cadences different but no less beautiful; of subtleties and
intensities which Elizabethan prose entirely ignores. He is
considering the way in which certain of the ancients met death:

An age seems to separate Sidney from Montaigne. The English
compared with the French are as boys compared with men.

But the Elizabethan prose writers, if they have the formlessness
of youth, have, too, its freshness and audacity. In the same essay
Sidney shapes language, masterfully and easily, to his liking; freely
and naturally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this prose to
perfection (and Dryden's prose is very near perfection) only the
discipline of the stage was necessary and the growth of
self-consciousness. It is in the plays, and especially in the comic
passages of the plays, that the finest Elizabethan prose is to be
found. The stage was the nursery where prose learnt to find its feet.
For on the stage people had to meet, to quip and crank, to suffer
interruptions, to talk of ordinary things.

Cler. A pox of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty!
there's no man can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days; till she
has painted, and perfumed, and washed, and scoured, but the boy here;
and him she wipes her oiled lips upon, like a sponge. I have made a
song (I pray thee hear it) on the subject.

[Page sings.

Still to be neat, still to be drest, &c.

True. And I am clearly on the other side: I love a good
dressing before any beauty o' the world. O, a woman is then like a
delicate garden; nor is there one kind of it; she may vary every
hour; take often counsel of her glass, and choose the best. If she
have good ears, show them; good hair, lay it out; good legs, wear
short clothes; a good hand, discover it often: practise any art to
mend breath, cleanse teeth, repair eyebrows; paint and profess
it.

So the talk runs in Ben Jonson's Silent Woman, knocked into
shape by interruptions, sharpened by collisions, and never allowed to
settle into stagnancy or swell into turbidity. But the publicity of
the stage and the perpetual presence of a second person were hostile
to that growing consciousness of one's self, that brooding in
solitude over the mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by,
sought expression and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir
Thomas Browne. His immense egotism has paved the way for all
psychological novelists, auto-biographers, confession-mongers, and
dealers in the curious shades of our private life. He it was who
first turned from the contacts of men with men to their lonely life
within. "The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my
own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other I use it but like my
globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation." All was
mystery and darkness as the first explorer walked the catacombs
swinging his lanthorn. "I feel sometimes a hell within myself;
Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me." In
these solitudes there were no guides and no companions. "I am in the
dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a
cloud." The strangest thoughts and imaginings have play with him as
he goes about his work, outwardly the most sober of mankind and
esteemed the greatest physician in Norwich. He has wished for death.
He has doubted all things. What if we are asleep in this world and
the conceits of life are as mere dreams? The tavern music, the Ave
Mary bell, the broken pot that the workman has dug out of the
field--at the sight and sound of them he stops dead, as if transfixed
by the astonishing vista that opens before his imagination. "We carry
with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her
prodigies in us." A halo of wonder encircles everything that he sees;
he turns his light gradually upon the flowers and insects and grasses
at his feet so as to disturb nothing in the mysterious processes of
their existence. With the same awe, mixed with a sublime complacency,
he records the discovery of his own qualities and attainments. He was
charitable and brave and averse from nothing. He was full of feeling
for others and merciless upon himself. "For my conversation, it is
like the sun's, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and
bad." He knows six languages, the laws, the customs and policies of
several states, the names of all the constellations and most of the
plants of his country, and yet, so sweeping is his imagination, so
large the horizon in which he sees this little figure walking that
"methinks I do not know so many as when I did but know a hundred, and
had scarcely ever simpled further than Cheapside".

He is the first of the autobiographers. Swooping and soaring at
the highest altitudes, he stoops suddenly with loving particularity
upon the details of his own body. His height was moderate, he tells
us, his eyes large and luminous; his skin dark but constantly
suffused with blushes. He dressed very plainly. He seldom laughed. He
collected coins, kept maggots in boxes, dissected the lungs of frogs,
braved the stench of the spermaceti whale, tolerated Jews, had a good
word for the deformity of the toad, and combined a scientific and
sceptical attitude towards most things with an unfortunate belief in
witches. In short, as we say when we cannot help laughing at the
oddities of people we admire most, he was a character, and the first
to make us feel that the most sublime speculations of the human
imagination are issued from a particular man, whom we can love. In
the midst of the solemnities of the Urn Burial we smile when he
remarks that afflictions induce callosities. The smile broadens to
laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the astonishing
conjectures of the Religio Medici. Whatever he writes is
stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, and we first become conscious of
impurities which hereafter stain literature with so many freakish
colours that, however hard we try, it is difficult to be certain
whether we are looking at a man or his writing. Now we are in the
presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the
finest lumber rooms in the world--a chamber stuffed from floor to
ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns' horns, and
magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery.

There are, it must be admitted, some highly formidable tracts in
English literature, and chief among them that jungle, forest, and
wilderness which is the Elizabethan drama. For many reasons, not here
to be examined, Shakespeare stands out, Shakespeare who has had the
light on him from his day to ours, Shakespeare who towers highest
when looked at from the level of his own contemporaries. But the
plays of the lesser Elizabethans--Greene, Dekker, Peele, Chapman,
Beaumont and Fletcher,--to adventure into that wilderness is for the
ordinary reader an ordeal, an upsetting experience which plys him
with questions, harries him with doubts, alternately delights and
vexes him with pleasures and pains. For we are apt to forget,
reading, as we tend to do, only the masterpieces of a bygone age, how
great a power the body of a literature possesses to impose itself:
how it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but takes us and
reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions principles which we
had got into the habit of taking for granted, and, in fact, splits us
into two parts as we read, making us, even as we enjoy, yield our
ground or stick to our guns.

At the outset in reading an Elizabethan play we are overcome by
the extraordinary discrepancy between the Elizabethan view of reality
and our own. The reality to which we have grown accustomed is,
speaking roughly, based upon the life and death of some knight called
Smith, who succeeded his father in the family business of pitwood
importers, timber merchants and coal exporters, was well known in
political, temperance, and church circles, did much for the poor of
Liverpool, and died last Wednesday of pneumonia while on a visit to
his son at Muswell Hill. That is the world we know. That is the
reality which our poets and novelists have to expound and illuminate.
Then we open the first Elizabethan play that comes to hand and read
how

I once did see
In my young travels through Armenia
An angry unicorn in his full career
Charge with too swift a foot a jeweller
That watch'd him for the treasure of his brow,
And ere he could get shelter of a tree
Nail him with his rich antlers to the earth.

Where is Smith, we ask, where is Liverpool? And the groves of
Elizabethan drama echo "Where?" Exquisite is the delight, sublime the
relief of being set free to wander in the land of the unicorn and the
jeweller among dukes and grandees, Gonzaloes and Bellimperias, who
spend their lives in murder and intrigue, dress up as men if they are
women, as women if they are men, see ghosts, run mad, and die in the
greatest profusion on the slightest provocation, uttering as they
fall imprecations of superb vigour or elegies of the wildest despair.
But soon the low, the relentless voice, which if we wish to identify
it we must suppose typical of a reader fed on modern English
literature, and French and Russian, asks why, then, with all this to
stimulate and enchant, these old plays are for long stretches of time
so intolerably dull? Is it not that literature, if it is to keep us
on the alert through five acts or thirty-two chapters, must somehow
be based on Smith, have one toe touching Liverpool, take off into
whatever heights it pleases from reality? We are not so purblind as
to suppose that a man because his name is Smith and he lives at
Liverpool is therefore "real". We know indeed that this reality is a
chameleon quality, the fantastic becoming as we grow used to it often
the closest to the truth, the sober the furthest from it, and nothing
proving a writer's greatness more than his capacity to consolidate
his scene by the use of what, until he touched them, seemed wisps of
cloud and threads of gossamer. Our contention merely is that there is
a station, somewhere in mid-air, whence Smith and Liverpool can be
seen to the best advantage; that the great artist is the man who
knows where to place himself above the shifting scenery; that while
he never loses sight of Liverpool he never sees it in the wrong
perspective. The Elizabethans bore us, then, because their Smiths are
all changed to dukes, their Liverpools to fabulous islands and
palaces in Genoa. Instead of keeping a proper poise above life they
soar miles into the empyrean, where nothing is visible for long hours
at a time but clouds at their revelry, and a cloud landscape is not
ultimately satisfactory to human eyes. The Elizabethans bore us
because they suffocate our imaginations rather than set them to
work.

Still, though potent enough, the boredom of an Elizabethan play is
of a different quality altogether from the boredom which a
nineteenth-century play, a Tennyson or a Henry Taylor play, inflicts.
The riot of images, the violent volubility of language, all that
cloys and satiates in the Elizabethans yet appears to be drawn up
with a roar as a feeble fire is sucked up by a newspaper. There is,
even in the worst, an intermittent bawling vigour which gives us the
sense in our quiet arm-chairs of ostlers and orange-girls catching up
the lines, flinging them back, hissing or stamping applause. But the
deliberate drama of the Victorian age is evidently written in a
study. It has for audience ticking clocks and rows of classics bound
in half morocco. There is no stamping, no applause. It does not, as,
with all its faults, the Elizabethan audience did, leaven the mass
with fire. Rhetorical and bombastic, the lines are flung and hurried
into existence and reach the same impromptu felicities, have the same
lip-moulded profusion and unexpectedness, which speech sometimes
achieves, but seldom in our day the deliberate, solitary pen. Indeed,
half the work of the dramatists, one feels, was done in the
Elizabethan age by the public.

Against that, however, is to be set the fact that the influence of
the public was in many respects detestable. To its door we must lay
the greatest infliction that Elizabethan drama puts upon us--the
plot; the incessant, improbable, almost unintelligible convolutions
which presumably gratified the spirit of an excitable and unlettered
public actually in the playhouse, but only confuse and fatigue a
reader with the book before him. Undoubtedly something must happen;
undoubtedly a play where nothing happens is an impossibility. But we
have a right to demand (since the Greeks have proved that it is
perfectly possible) that what happens shall have an end in view. It
shall agitate great emotions; bring into existence memorable scenes;
stir the actors to say what could not be said without this stimulus.
Nobody can fail to remember the plot of the Antigone, because
what happens is so closely bound up with the emotions of the actors
that we remember the people and the plot at one and the same time.
But who can tell us what happens in the White Devil, or the
Maid's Tragedy, except by remembering the story apart from the
emotions which it has aroused? As for the lesser Elizabethans, like
Greene and Kyd, the complexities of their plots are so great, and the
violence which those plots demand so terrific, that the actors
themselves are obliterated and emotions which, according to our
convention at least, deserve the most careful investigation, the most
delicate analysis, are clean sponged off the slate. And the result is
inevitable. Outside Shakespeare and perhaps Ben Jonson, there are no
characters in Elizabethan drama, only violences whom we know so
little that we can scarcely care what becomes of them. Take any hero
or heroine in those early plays--Bellimperia in the Spanish
Tragedy will serve as well as another--and can we honestly say
that we care a jot for the unfortunate lady who runs the whole gamut
of human misery to kill herself in the end? No more than for an
animated broomstick, we must reply, and in a work dealing with men
and women the prevalence of broomsticks is a drawback. But the
Spanish Tragedy is admittedly a crude forerunner, chiefly
valuable because such primitive efforts lay bare the formidable
framework which greater dramatists could modify, but had to use.
Ford, it is claimed, is of the school of Stendhal and of Flaubert;
Ford is a psychologist. Ford is an analyst. "This man", says Mr.
Havelock Ellis, "writes of women not as a dramatist nor as a lover,
but as one who has searched intimately and felt with instinctive
sympathy the fibres of their hearts."

The play--'Tis pity she's a Whore--upon which this
judgement is chiefly based shows us the whole nature of Annabella
spun from pole to pole in a series of tremendous vicissitudes. First,
her brother tells her that he loves her; next she confesses her love
for him; next finds herself with child by him; next forces herself to
marry Soranzo; next is discovered; next repents; finally is killed,
and it is her lover and brother who kills her. To trace the trail of
feelings which such crises and calamities might be expected to breed
in a woman of ordinary sensibility might have filled volumes. A
dramatist, of course, has no volumes to fill. He is forced to
contract. Even so, he can illumine; he can reveal enough for us to
guess the rest. But what is it that we know without using microscopes
and splitting hairs about the character of Annabella? Gropingly we
make out that she is a spirited girl, with her defiance of her
husband when he abuses her, her snatches of Italian song, her ready
wit, her simple glad love-making. But of character as we understand
the word there is no trace. We do not know how she reaches her
conclusions, only that she has reached them. Nobody describes her.
She is always at the height of her passion, never at its approach.
Compare her with Anna Karenina. The Russian woman is flesh and blood,
nerves and temperament, has heart, brain, body and mind where the
English girl is flat and crude as a face painted on a playing card;
she is without depth, without range, without intricacy. But as we say
this we know that we have missed something. We have let the meaning
of the play slip through our hands. We have ignored the emotion which
has been accumulating because it has accumulated in places where we
have not expected to find it. We have been comparing the play with
prose, and the play, after all, is poetry.

The play is poetry, we say, and the novel prose. Let us attempt to
obliterate detail, and place the two before us side by side, feeling,
so far as we can, the angles and edges of each, recalling each, so
far as we are able, as a whole. Then, at once, the prime differences
emerge; the long leisurely accumulated novel; the little contracted
play; the emotion all split up, dissipated and then woven together,
slowly and gradually massed into a whole, in the novel; the emotion
concentrated, generalised, heightened in the play. What moments of
intensity, what phrases of astonishing beauty the play shot at
us!

O, my lords,
I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another
Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward.

or

You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much wither'd.

With all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say

"You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia".

Some of the most profound of human emotions are therefore beyond
her reach. The extremes of passion are not for the novelist; the
perfect marriages of sense and sound are not for him; he must tame
his swiftness to sluggardry; keep his eyes on the ground, not on the
sky: suggest by description, not reveal by illumination. Instead of
singing

Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear;
Say I died true,

he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the grave and the
undertakers' men snuffling past in their four-wheelers. How then can
we compare this lumbering and lagging art with poetry? Granted all
the little dexterities by which the novelist makes us know the
individual and recognise the real, the dramatist goes beyond the
single and the separate, shows us not Annabella in love, but love
itself; not Anna Karenina throwing herself under the train, but ruin
and death and the

. . . soul, like a ship in a black storm,
. . . driven, I know not whither.

So with pardonable impatience we might exclaim as we shut our
Elizabethan play. But what then is the exclamation with which we
close War and Peace? Not one of disappointment; we are not
left lamenting the superficiality, upbraiding the triviality of the
novelist's art. Rather we are made more than ever aware of the
inexhaustible richness of human sensibility. Here, in the play, we
recognise the general; here, in the novel, the particular. Here we
gather all our energies into a bunch and spring. Here we extend and
expand and let come slowly in from all quarters deliberate
impressions, accumulated messages. The mind is so saturated with
sensibility, language so inadequate to its experience, that, far from
ruling off one form of literature or decreeing its inferiority to
others, we complain that they are still unable to keep pace with the
wealth of material, and wait impatiently the creation of what may yet
be devised to liberate us of the enormous burden of the
unexpressed.

Thus, in spite of dullness, bombast, rhetoric, and confusion, we
still read the lesser Elizabethans, still find ourselves adventuring
in the land of the jeweller and the unicorn. The familiar factories
of Liverpool fade into thin air and we scarcely recognise any
likeness between the knight who imported timber and died of pneumonia
at Muswell Hill and the Armenian Duke who fell like a Roman on his
sword while the owl shrieked in the ivy and the Duchess gave birth to
a still-born babe 'mongst women howling. To join those territories
and recognise the same man in different disguises we have to adjust
and revise. But make the necessary alterations in perspective, draw
in those filaments of sensibility which the moderns have so
marvellously developed, use instead the ear and the eye which the
moderns have so basely starved, hear words as they are laughed and
shouted, not as they are printed in black letters on the page, see
before your eyes the changing faces and living bodies of men and
women--put yourself, in short, into a different but not more
elementary stage of your reading development and then the true merits
of Elizabethan drama will assert themselves. The power of the whole
is undeniable. Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought
plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. Theirs is that
broad humour based upon the nakedness of the body, which, however
arduously the public-spirited may try, is impossible since the body
is draped. Then at the back of this, imposing not unity but some sort
of stability, is what we may briefly call a sense of the presence of
the Gods. He would be a bold critic who should attempt to impose any
creed upon the swarm and variety of the Elizabethan dramatists, and
yet it implies some timidity if we take it for granted that a whole
literature with common characteristics is a mere evaporation of high
spirits, a money-making enterprise, a fluke of the mind which, owing
to favourable circumstances, came off successfully. Even in the
jungle and the wilderness the compass still points.

"Lord, Lord, that I were dead!"

they are for ever crying.

O thou soft natural death that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber--

The pageant of the world is marvellous, but the pageant of the
world is vanity.

glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams
And shadows soon decaying: on the stage
Of my mortality my youth hath acted
Some scenes of vanity--

To die and be quit of it all is their desire; the bell that tolls
throughout the drama is death and disenchantment.

All life is but a wandering to find home,
When we're gone, we're there.

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to
confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life
compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice
of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers' breath, of
ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. To this, life at
its most reckless and abundant, they reply

Man is a tree that hath no top in cares,
No root in comforts; all his power to live
Is given to no end but t' have power to grieve.

It is this echo flung back and back from the other side of the
play which, if it has not the name, still has the effect of the
presence of the Gods. So we ramble through the jungle, forest, and
wilderness of Elizabethan drama. So we consort with Emperors and
clowns, jewellers and unicorns, and laugh and exult and marvel at the
splendour and humour and fantasy of it all. A noble rage consumes us
when the curtain falls; we are bored too, and nauseated by the
wearisome old tricks and florid bombast. A dozen deaths of full-grown
men and women move us less than the suffering of one of Tolstoi's
flies. Wandering in the maze of the impossible and tedious story
suddenly some passionate intensity seizes us; some sublimity exalts,
or some melodious snatch of song enchants. It is a world full of
tedium and delight, pleasure and curiosity, of extravagant laughter,
poetry, and splendour. But gradually it comes over us, what then are
we being denied? What is it that we are coming to want so
persistently, that unless we get it instantly we must seek elsewhere?
It is solitude. There is no privacy here. Always the door opens and
some one comes in. All is shared, made visible, audible, dramatic.
Meanwhile, as if tired with company, the mind steals off to muse in
solitude; to think, not to act; to comment, not to share; to explore
its own darkness, not the bright-lit-up surfaces of others. It turns
to Donne, to Montaigne, to Sir Thomas Browne, to the keepers of the
keys of solitude.

Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which René,
King of Sicily, had painted of himself, and asked, "Why is it not, in
like manner, lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he
did with a crayon?" Off-hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful,
but nothing could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own
features are almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we
attempt the task, the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of
profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty.

After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have
succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys
and Rousseau perhaps. The Religio Medici is a coloured glass
through which darkly one sees racing stars and a strange and
turbulent soul. A bright polished mirror reflects the face of Boswell
peeping between other people's shoulders in the famous biography. But
this talking of oneself, following one's own vagaries, giving the
whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its
confusion, its variety, its imperfection--this art belonged to one
man only: to Montaigne. As the centuries go by, there is always a
crowd before that picture, gazing into its depths, seeing their own
faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer they look, never being
able to say quite what it is that they see. New editions testify to
the perennial fascination. Here is the Navarre Society in England
reprinting in five fine volumes1 Cotton's translation;
while in France the firm of Louis Conard is issuing the complete
works of Montaigne with the various readings in an edition to which
Dr. Armaingaud has devoted a long lifetime of research.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand,
is not easy.

We hear of but two or three of the ancients who have beaten this
road [said Montaigne]. No one since has followed the track; 'tis a
rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and
uncertain, as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of
its intricate internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many
little nimble motions; 'tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and
that withdraws us from the common and most recommended employments of
the world.

There is, in the first place, the difficulty of expression. We all
indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it
comes to saying, even to some one opposite, what we think, then how
little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out
of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking
and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up
momentarily with a wandering light. Face, voice, and accent eke out
our words and impress their feebleness with character in speech. But
the pen is a rigid instrument; it can say very little; it has all
kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own. It is dictatorial too: it
is always making ordinary men into prophets, and changing the natural
stumbling trip of human speech into the solemn and stately march of
pens. It is for this reason that Montaigne stands out from the
legions of the dead with such irrepressible vivacity. We can never
doubt for an instant that his book was himself. He refused to teach;
he refused to preach; he kept on saying that he was just like other
people. All his effort was to write himself down, to communicate, to
tell the truth, and that is a "rugged road, more than it seems".

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the
supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by
no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to
ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to
what other people say. Other people, for instance, long ago made up
their minds that old invalidish gentlemen ought to stay at home and
edify the rest of us by the spectacle of their connubial fidelity.
The soul of Montaigne said, on the contrary, that it is in old age
that one ought to travel, and marriage, which, rightly, is very
seldom founded on love, is apt to become, towards the end of life, a
formal tie better broken up. Again with politics, statesmen are
always praising the greatness of Empire, and preaching the moral duty
of civilising the savage. But look at the Spanish in Mexico, cried
Montaigne in a burst of rage. "So many cities levelled with the
ground, so many nations exterminated . . . and the richest and most
beautiful part of the world turned upside down for the traffic of
pearl and pepper! Mechanic victories!" And then when the peasants
came and told him that they had found a man dying of wounds and
deserted him for fear lest justice might incriminate them, Montaigne
asked:

What could I have said to these people? 'Tis certain that this
office of humanity would have brought them into trouble. . . . There
is nothing so much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty as the
laws.

Here the soul, getting restive, is lashing out at the more
palpable forms of Montaigne's great bugbears, convention and
ceremony. But watch her as she broods over the fire in the inner room
of that tower which, though detached from the main building, has so
wide a view over the estate. Really she is the strangest creature in
the world, far from heroic, variable as a weathercock, "bashful,
insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate;
ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing,
ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal"--in short, so complex, so
indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty
for her in public, that a man might spend his life merely in trying
to run her to earth. The pleasure of the pursuit more than rewards
one for any damage that it may inflict upon one's worldly prospects.
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he
is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through
and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives,
while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a
kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because
they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and
faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward
emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

Surely then, if we ask this great master of the art of life to
tell us his secret, he will advise us to withdraw to the inner room
of our tower and there turn the pages of books, pursue fancy after
fancy as they chase each other up the chimney, and leave the
government of the world to others. Retirement and
contemplation--these must be the main elements of his prescription.
But no; Montaigne is by no means explicit. It is impossible to
extract a plain answer from that subtle, half smiling, half
melancholy man, with the heavy-lidded eyes and the dreamy, quizzical
expression. The truth is that life in the country, with one's books
and vegetables and flowers, is often extremely dull. He could never
see that his own green peas were so much better than other people's.
Paris was the place he loved best in the whole world--"jusques
à ses verrues et à ses taches". As for reading, he
could seldom read any book for more than an hour at a time, and his
memory was so bad that he forgot what was in his mind as he walked
from one room to another. Book learning is nothing to be proud of,
and as for the achievements of science, what do they amount to? He
had always mixed with clever men, and his father had a positive
veneration for them, but he had observed that, though they have their
fine moments, their rhapsodies, their visions, the cleverest tremble
on the verge of folly. Observe yourself: one moment you are exalted;
the next a broken glass puts your nerves on edge. All extremes are
dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of the road, in the
common ruts, however muddy. In writing choose the common words; avoid
rhapsody and eloquence--yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the
best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

It appears, then, that we are to aim at a democratic simplicity.
We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the
commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging
who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who
live the real life and speak the real language. There is certainly an
element of truth in that. Things are said very finely at the lower
end of the table. There are perhaps more of the qualities that matter
among the ignorant than among the learned. But again, what a vile
thing the rabble is! "the mother of ignorance, injustice, and
inconstancy. Is it reasonable that the life of a wise man should
depend upon the judgment of fools?" Their minds are weak, soft and
without power of resistance. They must be told what it is expedient
for them to know. It is not for them to face facts as they are. The
truth can only be known by the well-born soul--"l'âme bien
née". Who, then, are these well-born souls, whom we would
imitate if only Montaigne would enlighten us more precisely?

But no. "Je n'enseigne poinct; je raconte." After all, how could
he explain other people's souls when he could say nothing "entirely
simply and solidly, without confusion or mixture, in one word", about
his own, when indeed it became daily more and more in the dark to
him? One quality or principle there is perhaps--that one must not lay
down rules. The souls whom one would wish to resemble, like Etienne
de La Boétie, for example, are always the supplest. "C'est
estre, mais ce n'est pas vivre, que de se tenir attaché et
oblige par necessité a un seul train." The laws are mere
conventions, utterly unable to keep touch with the vast variety and
turmoil of human impulses; habits and customs are a convenience
devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their
souls free play. But we, who have a private life and hold it
infinitely the dearest of our possessions, suspect nothing so much as
an attitude. Directly we begin to protest, to attitudinise, to lay
down laws, we perish. We are living for others, not for ourselves. We
must respect those who sacrifice themselves in the public service,
load them with honours, and pity them for allowing, as they must, the
inevitable compromise; but for ourselves let us fly fame, honour, and
all offices that put us under an obligation to others. Let us simmer
over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our
hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle--for the soul throws
up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our
being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes
into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the
wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without
caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters
except life; and, of course, order.

This freedom, then, which is the essence of our being, has to be
controlled. But it is difficult to see what power we are to invoke to
help us, since every restraint of private opinion or public law has
been derided, and Montaigne never ceases to pour scorn upon the
misery, the weakness, the vanity of human nature. Perhaps, then, it
will be well to turn to religion to guide us? "Perhaps" is one of his
favourite expressions; "perhaps" and "I think" and all those words
which qualify the rash assumptions of human ignorance. Such words
help one to muffle up opinions which it would be highly impolitic to
speak outright. For one does not say everything; there are some
things which at present it is advisable only to hint. One writes for
a very few people, who understand. Certainly, seek the Divine
guidance by all means, but meanwhile there is, for those who live a
private life, another monitor, an invisible censor within, "un patron
au dedans", whose blame is much more to be dreaded than any other
because he knows the truth; nor is there anything sweeter than the
chime of his approval. This is the judge to whom we must submit; this
is the censor who will help us to achieve that order which is the
grace of a well-born soul. For "C'est une vie exquise, celle qui se
maintient en ordre jusques en son privé". But he will act by
his own light; by some internal balance will achieve that precarious
and everchanging poise which, while it controls, in no way impedes
the soul's freedom to explore and experiment. Without other guide,
and without precedent, undoubtedly it is far more difficult to live
well the private life than the public. It is an art which each must
learn separately, though there are, perhaps, two or three men, like
Homer, Alexander the Great, and Epaminondas among the ancients, and
Etienne de La Boétie among the moderns, whose example may help
us. But it is an art; and the very material in which it works is
variable and complex and infinitely mysterious--human nature. To
human nature we must keep close. ". . . il faut vivre entre les
vivants". We must dread any eccentricity or refinement which cuts us
off from our fellow-beings. Blessed are those who chat easily with
their neighbours about their sport or their buildings or their
quarrels, and honestly enjoy the talk of carpenters and gardeners. To
communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief
delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a
living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and
province. Such wonders there are in the world; halcyons and
undiscovered lands, men with dogs' heads and eyes in their chests,
and laws and customs, it may well be, far superior to our own.
Possibly we are asleep in this world; possibly there is some other
which is apparent to beings with a sense which we now lack.

Here then, in spite of all contradictions and all qualifications,
is something definite. These essays are an attempt to communicate a
soul. On this point at least he is explicit. It is not fame that he
wants; it is not that men shall quote him in years to come; he is
setting up no statue in the market-place; he wishes only to
communicate his soul. Communication is health; communication is
truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down
boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most
diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant
to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.

There are people who, when they travel, wrap themselves up, "se
défendans de la contagion d'un air incogneu" in silence and
suspicion. When they dine they must have the same food they get at
home. Every sight and custom is bad unless it resembles those of
their own village. They travel only to return. That is entirely the
wrong way to set about it. We should start without any fixed idea
where we are going to spend the night, or when we propose to come
back; the journey is everything. Most necessary of all, but rarest
good fortune, we should try to find before we start some man of our
own sort who will go with us and to whom we can say the first thing
that comes into our heads. For pleasure has no relish unless we share
it. As for the risks--that we may catch cold or get a headache--it is
always worth while to risk a little illness for the sake of pleasure.
"Le plaisir est des principales espèces du profit." Besides if
we do what we like, we always do what is good for us. Doctors and
wise men may object, but let us leave doctors and wise men to their
own dismal philosophy. For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women,
let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of
the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn
now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before
the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a beautiful
voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days and
fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that
deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and
the most common actions--a walk, a talk, solitude in one's own
orchard--can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind.
Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger's-breadth from
goodness. So, in the name of health and sanity, let us not dwell on
the end of the journey. Let death come upon us planting our cabbages,
or on horseback, or let us steal away to some cottage and there let
strangers close our eyes, for a servant sobbing or the touch of a
hand would break us down. Best of all, let death find us at our usual
occupations, among girls and good fellows who make no protests, no
lamentations; let him find us "parmy les jeux, les festins, faceties,
entretiens communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers
amoureux". But enough of death; it is life that matters.

It is life that emerges more and more clearly as these essays
reach not their end, but their suspension in full career. It is life
that becomes more and more absorbing as death draws near, one's self,
one's soul, every fact of existence: that one wears silk stockings
summer and winter; puts water in one's wine; has one's hair cut after
dinner; must have glass to drink from; has never worn spectacles; has
a loud voice; carries a switch in one's hand; bites one's tongue;
fidgets with one's feet; is apt to scratch one's ears; likes meat to
be high; rubs one's teeth with a napkin (thank God, they are good!);
must have curtains to one's bed; and, what is rather curious, began
by liking radishes, then disliked them, and now likes them again. No
fact is too little to let it slip through one's fingers, and besides
the interest of facts themselves there is the strange power we have
of changing facts by the force of the imagination. Observe how the
soul is always casting her own lights and shadows; makes the
substantial hollow and the frail substantial; fills broad daylight
with dreams; is as much excited by phantoms as by reality; and in the
moment of death sports with a trifle. Observe, too, her duplicity,
her complexity. She hears of a friend's loss and sympathises, and yet
has a bitter-sweet malicious pleasure in the sorrows of others. She
believes; at the same time she does not believe. Observe her
extraordinary susceptibility to impressions, especially in youth. A
rich man steals because his father kept him short of money as a boy.
This wall one builds not for oneself, but because one's father loved
building. In short, the soul is all laced about with nerves and
sympathies which affect her every action, and yet, even now in 1580,
no one has any clear knowledge--such cowards we are, such lovers of
the smooth conventional ways--how she works or what she is except
that of all things she is the most mysterious, and one's self the
greatest monster and miracle in the world. ". . . plus je me hante et
connois, plus ma difformité m'estonne, moins je m'entens en
moy." Observe, observe perpetually, and, so long as ink and paper
exist, "sans cesse et sans travail" Montaigne will write.

But there remains one final question which, if we could make him
look up from his enthralling occupation, we should like to put to
this great master of the art of life. In these extraordinary volumes
of short and broken, long and learned, logical and contradictory
statements, we have heard the very pulse and rhythm of the soul,
beating day after day, year after year, through a veil which, as time
goes on, fines itself almost to transparency. Here is some one who
succeeded in the hazardous enterprise of living; who served his
country and lived retired; was landlord, husband, father; entertained
kings, loved women, and mused for hours alone over old books. By
means of perpetual experiment and observation of the subtlest he
achieved at last a miraculous adjustment of all these wayward parts
that constitute the human soul. He laid hold of the beauty of the
world with all his fingers. He achieved happiness. If he had had to
live again, he said, he would have lived the same life over. But, as
we watch with absorbed interest the enthralling spectacle of a soul
living openly beneath our eyes, the question frames itself, Is
pleasure the end of all? Whence this overwhelming interest in the
nature of the soul? Why this overmastering desire to communicate with
others? Is the beauty of this world enough, or is there, elsewhere,
some explanation of the mystery? To this what answer can there be?
There is none. There is only one more question: "Que scais-je?"

". . . All I desire is fame ", wrote Margaret Cavendish, Duchess
of Newcastle. And while she lived her wish was granted. Garish in her
dress, eccentric in her habits, chaste in her conduct, coarse in her
speech, she succeeded during her lifetime in drawing upon herself the
ridicule of the great and the applause of the learned. But the last
echoes of that clamour have now all died away; she lives only in the
few splendid phrases that Lamb scattered upon her tomb; her poems,
her plays, her philosophies, her orations, her discourses--all those
folios and quartos in which, she protested, her real life was
shrined--moulder in the gloom of public libraries, or are decanted
into tiny thimbles which hold six drops of their profusion. Even the
curious student, inspired by the words of Lamb, quails before the
mass of her mausoleum, peers in, looks about him, and hurries out
again, shutting the door.

1The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle,
Etc., edited by C. H. Firth; Poems and Fancies, by the
Duchess of Newcastle; The World's Olio, Orations of divers Sorts
Accommodated to Divers Places; Female Orations; Plays; Philosophical
Letters, etc., etc.

But that hasty glance has shown him the outlines of a memorable
figure. Born (it is conjectured) in 1624, Margaret was the youngest
child of a Thomas Lucas, who died when she was an infant, and her
upbringing was due to her mother, a lady of remarkable character, of
majestic grandeur and beauty "beyond the ruin of time". "She was very
skilful in leases, and setting of lands and court keeping, ordering
of stewards, and the like affairs." The wealth which thus accrued she
spent, not on marriage portions, but on generous and delightful
pleasures, "out of an opinion that if she bred us with needy
necessity it might chance to create in us sharking qualities". Her
eight sons and daughters were never beaten, but reasoned with, finely
and gaily dressed, and allowed no conversation with servants, not
because they are servants but because servants "are for the most part
ill-bred as well as meanly born". The daughters were taught the usual
accomplishments "rather for formality than for benefit", it being
their mother's opinion that character, happiness, and honesty were of
greater value to a woman than fiddling and singing, or "the prating
of several languages".

Already Margaret was eager to take advantage of such indulgence to
gratify certain tastes. Already she liked reading better than
needlework, dressing and "inventing fashions" better than reading,
and writing best of all. Sixteen paper books of no title, written in
straggling letters, for the impetuosity of her thought always outdid
the pace of her fingers, testify to the use she made of her mother's
liberality. The happiness of their home life had other results as
well. They were a devoted family. Long after they were married,
Margaret noted, these handsome brothers and sisters, with their
well-proportioned bodies, their clear complexions, brown hair, sound
teeth, "tunable voices", and plain way of speaking, kept themselves
"in a flock together". The presence of strangers silenced them. But
when they were alone, whether they walked in Spring Gardens or Hyde
Park, or had music, or supped in barges upon the water, their tongues
were loosed and they made "very merry amongst themselves, . . .
judging, condemning, approving, commending, as they thought
good".

The happy family life had its effect upon Margaret's character. As
a child, she would walk for hours alone, musing and contemplating and
reasoning with herself of "everything her senses did present". She
took no pleasure in activity of any kind. Toys did not amuse her, and
she could neither learn foreign languages nor dress as other people
did. Her great pleasure was to invent dresses for herself, which
nobody else was to copy, "for", she remarks, "I always took delight
in a singularity, even in accoutrements of habits".

Such a training, at once so cloistered and so free, should have
bred a lettered old maid, glad of her seclusion, and the writer
perhaps of some volume of letters or translations from the classics,
which we should still quote as proof of the cultivation of our
ancestresses. But there was a wild streak in Margaret, a love of
finery and extravagance and fame, which was for ever upsetting the
orderly arrangements of nature. When she heard that the Queen, since
the outbreak of the Civil War, had fewer maids-of-honour than usual,
she had "a great desire" to become one of them. Her mother let her go
against the judgement of the rest of the family, who, knowing that
she had never left home and had scarcely been beyond their sight,
justly thought that she might behave at Court to her disadvantage.
"Which indeed I did," Margaret confessed; "for I was so bashful when
I was out of my mother's, brothers', and sisters' sight that . . . I
durst neither look up with my eyes, nor speak, nor be any way
sociable, insomuch as I was thought a natural fool." The courtiers
laughed at her; and she retaliated in the obvious way. People were
censorious; men were jealous of brains in a woman; women suspected
intellect in their own sex; and what other lady, she might justly
ask, pondered as she walked on the nature of matter and whether
snails have teeth? But the laughter galled her, and she begged her
mother to let her come home. This being refused, wisely as the event
turned out, she stayed on for two years (1643-45), finally going with
the Queen to Paris, and there, among the exiles who came to pay their
respects to the Court, was the Marquis of Newcastle. To the general
amazement, the princely nobleman, who had led the King's forces to
disaster with indomitable courage but little skill, fell in love with
the shy, silent, strangely dressed maid-of-honour. It was not
"amorous love, but honest, honourable love", according to Margaret.
She was no brilliant match; she had gained a reputation for prudery
and eccentricity. What, then, could have made so great a nobleman
fall at her feet? The onlookers were full of derision, disparagement,
and slander. "I fear", Margaret wrote to the Marquis, "others foresee
we shall be unfortunate, though we see it not ourselves, or else
there would not be such pains to untie the knot of our affections."
Again, "Saint Germains is a place of much slander, and thinks I send
too often to you". "Pray consider", she warned him, "that I have
enemies." But the match was evidently perfect. The Duke, with his
love of poetry and music and play-writing, his interest in
philosophy, his belief "that nobody knew or could know the cause of
anything", his romantic and generous temperament, was naturally drawn
to a woman who wrote poetry herself, was also a philosopher of the
same way of thinking, and lavished upon him not only the admiration
of a fellow-artist, but the gratitude of a sensitive creature who had
been shielded and succoured by his extraordinary magnanimity. "He did
approve", she wrote, "of those bashful fears which many condemned, .
. . and though I did dread marriage and shunned men's company as much
as I could, yet I . . . had not the power to refuse him." She kept
him company during the long years of exile; she entered with
sympathy, if not with understanding, into the conduct and
acquirements of those horses which he trained to such perfection that
the Spaniards crossed themselves and cried "Miraculo!" as they
witnessed their corvets, voltoes, and pirouettes; she believed that
the horses even made a "trampling action" for joy when he came into
the stables; she pleaded his cause in England during the
Protectorate; and, when the Restoration made it possible for them to
return to England, they lived together in the depths of the country
in the greatest seclusion and perfect contentment, scribbling plays,
poems, philosophies, greeting each other's works with raptures of
delight, and confabulating, doubtless, upon such marvels of the
natural world as chance threw their way. They were laughed at by
their contemporaries; Horace Walpole sneered at them. But there can
be no doubt that they were perfectly happy.

For now Margaret could apply herself uninterruptedly to her
writing. She could devise fashions for herself and her servants. She
could scribble more and more furiously with fingers that became less
and less able to form legible letters. She could even achieve the
miracle of getting her plays acted in London and her philosophies
humbly perused by men of learning. There they stand, in the British
Museum, volume after volume, swarming with a diffused, uneasy,
contorted vitality. Order, continuity, the logical development of her
argument are all unknown to her. No fears impede her. She has the
irresponsibility of a child and the arrogance of a Duchess. The
wildest fancies come to her, and she canters away on their backs. We
seem to hear her, as the thoughts boil and bubble, calling to John,
who sat with a pen in his hand next door, to come quick, "John, John,
I conceive!" And down it goes--whatever it may be; sense or nonsense;
some thought on women's education--"Women live like Bats or Owls,
labour like Beasts, and die like Worms, . . . the best bred women are
those whose minds are civilest"; some speculation that had struck
her, perhaps, walking that afternoon alone--why "hogs have the
measles", why "dogs that rejoice swing their tails", or what the
stars are made of, or what this chrysalis is that her maid has
brought her, and she keeps warm in a corner of her room. On and on,
from subject to subject she flies, never stopping to correct, "for
there is more pleasure in making than in mending", talking aloud to
herself of all those matters that filled her brain to her perpetual
diversion--of wars, and boarding-schools, and cutting down trees, of
grammar and morals, of monsters and the British, whether opium in
small quantities is good for lunatics, why it is that musicians are
mad. Looking upwards, she speculates still more ambitiously upon the
nature of the moon, and if the stars are blazing jellies; looking
downwards she wonders if the fishes know that the sea is salt; opines
that our heads are full of fairies, "dear to God as we are"; muses
whether there are not other worlds than ours, and reflects that the
next ship may bring us word of a new one. In short, "we are in utter
darkness". Meanwhile, what a rapture is thought!

As the vast books appeared from the stately retreat at Welbeck the
usual censors made the usual objections, and had to be answered,
despised, or argued with, as her mood varied, in the preface to every
work. They said, among other things, that her books were not her own,
because she used learned terms, and "wrote of many matters outside
her ken". She flew to her husband for help, and he answered,
characteristically, that the Duchess "had never conversed with any
professed scholar in learning except her brother and myself ". The
Duke's scholarship, moreover, was of a peculiar nature. "I have lived
in the great world a great while, and have thought of what has been
brought to me by the senses, more than was put into me by learned
discourse; for I do not love to be led by the nose, by authority, and
old authors; ipse dixit will not serve my turn." And then she
takes up the pen and proceeds, with the importunity and indiscretion
of a child, to assure the world that her ignorance is of the finest
quality imaginable. She has only seen Des Cartes and Hobbes, not
questioned them; she did indeed ask Mr. Hobbes to dinner, but he
could not come; she often does not listen to a word that is said to
her; she does not know any French, though she lived abroad for five
years; she has only read the old philosophers in Mr. Stanley's
account of them; of Des Cartes she has read but half of his work on
Passion; and of Hobbes only "the little book called De Cive",
all of which is infinitely to the credit of her native wit, so
abundant that outside succour pained it, so honest that it would not
accept help from others. It was from the plain of complete ignorance,
the untilled field of her own consciousness, that she proposed to
erect a philosophic system that was to oust all others. The results
were not altogether happy. Under the pressure of such vast
structures, her natural gift, the fresh and delicate fancy which had
led her in her first volume to write charmingly of Queen Mab and
fairyland, was crushed out of existence.

The palace of the Queen wherein she dwells,
Its fabric's built all of hodmandod shells;
The hangings of a Rainbow made that's thin,
Shew wondrous fine, when one first enters in;
The chambers made of Amber that is clear,
Do give a fine sweet smell, if fire be near;
Her bed a cherry stone, is carved throughout,
And with a butterfly's wing hung about;
Her sheets are of the skin of Dove's eyes made
Where on a violet bud her pillow's laid.

So she could write when she was young. But her fairies, if they
survived at all, grew up into hippopotami. Too generously her prayer
was granted:

Give me the free and noble style,
Which seems uncurb'd, though it be wild.

She became capable of involutions, and contortions and conceits of
which the following is among the shortest, but not the most
terrific:

The human head may be likened to a town:
The mouth when full, begun
Is market day, when empty, market's done;
The city conduct, where the water flows,
Is with two spouts, the nostrils and the nose.

She similised, energetically, incongruously, eternally; the sea
became a meadow, the sailors shepherds, the mast a maypole. The fly
was the bird of summer, trees were senators, houses ships, and even
the fairies, whom she loved better than any earthly thing, except the
Duke, are changed into blunt atoms and sharp atoms, and take part in
some of those horrible manoeuvres in which she delighted to marshal
the universe. Truly, "my Lady Sanspareille hath a strange spreading
wit". Worse still, without an atom of dramatic power, she turned to
play-writing. It was a simple process. The unwieldly thoughts which
turned and tumbled within her were christened Sir Golden Riches, Moll
Meanbred, Sir Puppy Dogman, and the rest, and sent revolving in
tedious debate upon the parts of the soul, or whether virtue is
better than riches, round a wise and learned lady who answered their
questions and corrected their fallacies at considerable length in
tones which we seem to have heard before.

Sometimes, however, the Duchess walked abroad. She would issue out
in her own proper person, dressed in a thousand gems and furbelows,
to visit the houses of the neighbouring gentry. Her pen made instant
report of these excursions. She recorded how Lady C. R. "did beat her
husband in a public assembly"; Sir F. O. "I am sorry to hear hath
undervalued himself so much below his birth and wealth as to marry
his kitchen-maid"; "Miss P. I. has become a sanctified soul, a
spiritual sister, she has left curling her hair, black patches are
become abominable to her, laced shoes and Galoshoes are steps to
pride--she asked me what posture I thought was the best to be used in
prayer". Her answer was probably unacceptable. "I shall not rashly go
there again", she says of one such "gossip-making". She was not, we
may hazard, a welcome guest or an altogether hospitable hostess. She
had a way of "bragging of myself" which frightened visitors so that
they left, nor was she sorry to see them go. Indeed, Welbeck was the
best place for her, and her own company the most congenial, with the
amiable Duke wandering in and out, with his plays and his
speculations, always ready to answer a question or refute a slander.
Perhaps it was this solitude that led her, chaste as she was in
conduct, to use language which in time to come much perturbed Sir
Egerton Brydges. She used, he complained, "expressions and images of
extraordinary coarseness as flowing from a female of high rank
brought up in courts". He forgot that this particular female had long
ceased to frequent the Court; she consorted chiefly with fairies; and
her friends were among the dead. Naturally, then, her language was
coarse. Nevertheless, though her philosophies are futile, and her
plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull, the vast bulk of the
Duchess is leavened by a vein of authentic fire. One cannot help
following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it
meanders and twinkles through page after page. There is something
noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and
bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence
so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender.
She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some
non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm. And although
"they", those terrible critics who had sneered and jeered at her ever
since, as a shy girl, she had not dared look her tormentors in the
face at Court, continued to mock, few of her critics, after all, had
the wit to trouble about the nature of the universe, or cared a straw
for the sufferings of the hunted hare, or longed, as she did, to talk
to some one "of Shakespeare's fools". Now, at any rate, the laugh is
not all on their side.

But laugh they did. When the rumour spread that the crazy Duchess
was coming up from Welbeck to pay her respects at Court, people
crowded the streets to look at her, and the curiosity of Mr. Pepys
twice brought him to wait in the Park to see her pass. But the
pressure of the crowd about her coach was too great. He could only
catch a glimpse of her in her silver coach with her footmen all in
velvet, a velvet cap on her head, and her hair about her ears. He
could only see for a moment between the white curtains the face of "a
very comely woman", and on she drove through the crowd of staring
Cockneys, all pressing to catch a glimpse of that romantic lady, who
stands, in the picture at Welbeck, with large melancholy eyes, and
something fastidious and fantastic in her bearing, touching a table
with the tips of long pointed fingers, in the calm assurance of
immortal fame.

Should you wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated
three hundred years hence, your best course is undoubtedly to keep a
diary. Only first be certain that you have the courage to lock your
genius in a private book and the humour to gloat over a fame that
will be yours only in the grave. For the good diarist writes either
for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely
hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience
there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is
what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in
conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance
even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity
will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or
having lain with the first ladies in the land.

The diary, for whose sake we are remembering the three hundredth
anniversary of the birth of John Evelyn,1 is a case in
point. It is sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down
like a calendar; but he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of
his heart, and all that he wrote might have been read aloud in the
evening with a calm conscience to his children. If we wonder, then,
why we still trouble to read what we must consider the uninspired
work of a good man we have to confess, first that diaries are always
diaries, books, that is, that we read in convalescence, on horseback,
in the grip of death; second, that this reading, about which so many
fine things have been said, is for the most part mere dreaming and
idling; lying in a chair with a book; watching the butterflies on the
dahlias; a profitless occupation which no critic has taken the
trouble to investigate, and on whose behalf only the moralist can
find a good word to say. For he will allow it to be an innocent
employment; and happiness, he will add, though derived from trivial
sources, has probably done more to prevent human beings from changing
their religions and killing their kings than either philosophy or the
pulpit.

1 Written in 1920.

It may be well, indeed, before reading much further in Evelyn's
book, to decide where it is that our modern view of happiness differs
from his. Ignorance, surely, ignorance is at the bottom of it; his
ignorance and our comparative erudition. No one can read the story of
Evelyn's foreign travels without envying in the first place his
simplicity of mind, in the second his activity. To take a simple
example of the difference between us--that butterfly will sit
motionless on the dahlia while the gardener trundles his barrow past
it, but let him flick the wings with the shadow of a rake, and off it
flies, up it goes, instantly on the alert. So, we may reflect, a
butterfly sees but does not hear; and here no doubt we are much on a
par with Evelyn. But as for going into the house to fetch a knife and
with that knife dissecting a Red Admiral's head, as Evelyn would have
done, no sane person in the twentieth century would entertain such a
project for a second. Individually we may know as little as Evelyn,
but collectively we know so much that there is little incentive to
venture on private discoveries. We seek the encyclopædia, not
the scissors; and know in two minutes not only more than was known to
Evelyn in his lifetime, but that the mass of knowledge is so vast
that it is scarcely worth while to possess a single crumb. Ignorant,
yet justly confident that with his own hands he might advance not
merely his private knowledge but the knowledge of mankind, Evelyn
dabbled in all the arts and sciences, ran about the Continent for ten
years, gazed with unflagging gusto upon hairy women and rational
dogs, and drew inferences and framed speculations which are now only
to be matched by listening to the talk of old women round the village
pump. The moon, they say, is so much larger than usual this autumn
that no mushrooms will grow, and the carpenter's wife will be brought
to bed of twins. So Evelyn, Fellow of the Royal Society, a gentleman
of the highest culture and intelligence, carefully noted all comets
and portents, and thought it a sinister omen when a whale came up the
Thames. In 1658, too, a whale had been seen. "That year died
Cromwell." Nature, it seems, was determined to stimulate the devotion
of her seventeenth-century admirers by displays of violence and
eccentricity from which she now refrains. There were storms, floods,
and droughts; the Thames frozen hard; comets flaring in the sky. If a
cat so much as kittened in Evelyn's bed the kitten was inevitably
gifted with eight legs, six ears, two bodies, and two tails.

But to return to happiness. It sometimes appears that if there is
an insoluble difference between our ancestors and ourselves it is
that we draw our happiness from different sources. We rate the same
things at different values. Something of this we may ascribe to their
ignorance and our knowledge. But are we to suppose that ignorance
alters the nerves and the affections? Are we to believe that it would
have been an intolerable penance for us to live familiarly with the
Elizabethans? Should we have found it necessary to leave the room
because of Shakespeare's habits, and to have refused Queen
Elizabeth's invitation to dinner? Perhaps so. For Evelyn was a sober
man of unusual refinement, and yet he pressed into a torture chamber
as we crowd to see the lions fed.

. . . they first bound his wrists with a strong rope or small
cable, and one end of it to an iron ring made fast to the wall about
four feet from the floor, and then his feet with another cable,
fastened about five feet farther than his utmost length to another
ring on the floor of the room. Thus suspended, and yet lying but
aslant, they slid a horse of wood under the rope which bound his
feet, which so exceedingly stiffened it, as severed the fellow's
joints in miserable sort, drawing him out at length in an
extraordinary manner, he having only a pair of linen drawers upon his
naked body . . .

And so on. Evelyn watched this to the end, and then remarked that
"the spectacle was so uncomfortable that I was not able to stay the
sight of another", as we might say that the lions growl so loud and
the sight of raw meat is so unpleasant that we will now visit the
penguins. Allowing for his discomfort, there is enough discrepancy
between his view of pain and ours to make us wonder whether we see
any fact with the same eyes, marry any woman from the same motives,
or judge any conduct by the same standards. To sit passive when
muscles tore and bones cracked, not to flinch when the wooden horse
was raised higher and the executioner fetched a horn and poured two
buckets of water down the man's throat, to suffer this iniquity on a
suspicion of robbery which the man denied--all this seems to put
Evelyn in one of those cages where we still mentally seclude the
riff-raff of Whitechapel. Only it is obvious that we have somehow got
it wrong. If we could maintain that our susceptibility to suffering
and love of justice were proof that all our humane instincts were as
highly developed as these, then we could say that the world improves,
and we with it. But let us get on with the diary.

In 1652, when it seemed that things had settled down unhappily
enough, "all being entirely in the rebels' hands", Evelyn returned to
England with his wife, his Tables of Veins and Arteries, his Venetian
glass and the rest of his curiosities, to lead the life of a country
gentleman of strong Royalist sympathies at Deptford. What with going
to church and going to town, settling his accounts and planting his
garden--"I planted the orchard at Sayes Court; new moon, wind
west"--his time was spent much as ours is. But there was one
difference which it is difficult to illustrate by a single quotation,
because the evidence is scattered all about in little insignificant
phrases. The general effect of them is that he used his eyes. The
visible world was always close to him. The visible world has receded
so far from us that to hear all this talk of buildings and gardens,
statues and carving, as if the look of things assailed one out of
doors as well as in, and were not confined to a few small canvases
hung upon the wall, seems strange. No doubt there are a thousand
excuses for us; but hitherto we have been finding excuses for him.
Wherever there was a picture to be seen by Julio Romano, Polydore,
Guido, Raphael, or Tintoretto, a finely built house, a prospect, or a
garden nobly designed, Evelyn stopped his coach to look at it, and
opened his diary to record his opinion. On August 27, Evelyn, with
Dr. Wren and others, was in St. Paul's surveying "the general decay
of that ancient and venerable church"; held with Dr. Wren another
judgement from the rest; and had a mind to build it with "a noble
cupola, a form of church building not as yet known in England but of
wonderful grace", in which Dr. Wren concurred. Six days later the
Fire of London altered their plans. It was Evelyn again who, walking
by himself, chanced to look in at the window of "a poor solitary
thatched house in a field in our parish", there saw a young man
carving at a crucifix, was overcome with an enthusiasm which does him
the utmost credit, and carried Grinling Gibbons and his carving to
Court.

Indeed, it is all very well to be scrupulous about the sufferings
of worms and sensitive to the dues of servant girls, but how pleasant
also if, with shut eyes, one could call up street after street of
beautiful houses. A flower is red; the apples rosy-gilt in the
afternoon sun; a picture has charm, especially as it displays the
character of a grandfather and dignifies a family descended from such
a scowl; but these are scattered fragments--little relics of beauty
in a world that has grown indescribably drab. To our charge of
cruelty Evelyn might well reply by pointing to Bayswater and the
purlieus of Clapham; and if he should assert that nothing now has
character or conviction, that no farmer in England sleeps with an
open coffin at his bedside to remind him of death, we could not
retort effectually offhand. True, we like the country. Evelyn never
looked at the sky.

But to return. After the Restoration Evelyn emerged in full
possession of a variety of accomplishments which in our time of
specialists seems remarkable enough. He was employed on public
business; he was Secretary to the Royal Society; he wrote plays and
poems; he was the first authority upon trees and gardens in England;
he submitted a design for the rebuilding of London; he went into the
question of smoke and its abatement--the lime trees in St. James's
Park being, it is said, the result of his cogitations; he was
commissioned to write a history of the Dutch war--in short, he
completely outdid the Squire of "The Princess", whom in many respects
he anticipated--

A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep,
A raiser of huge melons and of pine,
A patron of some thirty charities,
A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,
A quarter-sessions chairman abler none.

All that he was, and shared with Sir Walter another characteristic
which Tennyson does not mention. He was, we cannot help suspecting,
something of a bore, a little censorious, a little patronising, a
little too sure of his own merits, and a little obtuse to those of
other people. Or what is the quality, or absence of quality, that
checks our sympathies? Partly, perhaps, it is due to some
inconsistency which it would be harsh to call by so strong a name as
hypocrisy. Though he deplored the vices of his age he could never
keep away from the centre of them. "The luxurious dallying and
profaneness" of the Court, the sight of "Mrs. Nelly" looking over her
garden Wall and holding "very familiar discourse" with King Charles
on the green walk below, caused him acute disgust; yet he could never
decide to break with the Court and retire to "my poor but quiet
villa", which was of course the apple of his eye and one of the
show-places in England. Then, though he loved his daughter Mary, his
grief at her death did not prevent him from counting the number of
empty coaches drawn by six horses apiece that attended her funeral.
His women friends combined virtue with beauty to such an extent that
we can hardly credit them with wit into the bargain. Poor Mrs.
Godolphin at least, whom he celebrated in a sincere and touching
biography, "loved to be at funerals" and chose habitually "the dryest
and leanest morsels of meat", which may be the habits of an angel but
do not present her friendship with Evelyn in an alluring light. But
it is Pepys who sums up our case against Evelyn; Pepys who said of
him after a long morning's entertainment: "In fine a most excellent
person he is and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness;
but he may well be so, being a man so much above others". The words
exactly hit the mark, "A most excellent person he was"; but a little
conceited.

Pepys it is who prompts us to another reflection, inevitable,
unnecessary, perhaps unkind. Evelyn was no genius. His writing is
opaque rather than transparent; we see no depths through it, nor any
very secret movements of mind or heart. He can neither make us hate a
regicide nor love Mrs. Godolphin beyond reason. But he writes a
diary; and he writes it supremely well. Even as we drowse, somehow or
other the bygone gentleman sets up, through three centuries, a
perceptible tingle of communication, so that without laying stress on
anything in particular, stopping to dream, stopping to laugh,
stopping merely to look, we are yet taking notice all the time. His
garden, for example--how delightful is his disparagement of it, and
how acid his criticism of the gardens of others. Then, we may be
sure, the hens at Sayes Court laid the very best eggs in England; and
when the Tsar drove a wheelbarrow through his hedge, what a
catastrophe it was; and we can guess how Mrs. Evelyn dusted and
polished; and how Evelyn himself grumbled; and how punctilious and
efficient and trustworthy he was; how ready to give advice; how ready
to read his own works aloud; and how affectionate, withal, lamenting
bitterly, but not effusively--for the man with the long-drawn
sensitive face was never that--the death of the little prodigy
Richard, and recording how "after evening prayers was my child buried
near the rest of his brothers--my very dear children". He was not an
artist; no phrases linger in the mind; no paragraphs build themselves
up in memory; but as an artistic method this of going on with the
day's story circumstantially, bringing in people who will never be
mentioned again, leading up to crises which never take place,
introducing Sir Thomas Browne but never letting him speak, has its
fascination. All through his pages good men, bad men, celebrities,
nonentities are coming into the room and going out again. The greater
number we scarcely notice; the door shuts upon them and they
disappear. But now and again the sight of a vanishing coat-tail
suggests more than a whole figure sitting still in a full light.
Perhaps it is that we catch them unawares. Little they think that for
three hundred years and more they will be looked at in the act of
jumping a gate, or observing, like the old Marquis of Argyle, that
the turtle doves in the aviary are owls. Our eyes wander from one to
the other; our affections settle here or there--on hot-tempered
Captain Wray, for instance, who was choleric, had a dog that killed a
goat, was for shooting the goat's owner, was for shooting his horse
when it fell down a precipice; on M. Saladine; on M. Saladine's
daughter; on Captain Wray lingering at Geneva to make love to M.
Saladine's daughter; on Evelyn himself most of all, grown old,
walking in his garden at Wotton, his sorrows smoothed out, his
grandson doing him credit, the Latin quotations falling pat from his
lips, his trees flourishing, and the butterflies flying and flaunting
on his dahlias too.

The fear which attacks the recorder of centenaries lest he should
find himself measuring a diminishing spectre and forced to foretell
its approaching dissolution is not only absent in the case of
Robinson Crusoe but the mere thought of it is ridiculous. It
may be true that Robinson Crusoe is two hundred years of age
upon the twenty-fifth of April 1919, but far from raising the
familiar speculations as to whether people now read it and will
continue to read it, the effect of the bi-centenary is to make us
marvel that Robinson Crusoe, the perennial and immortal,
should have been in existence so short a time as that. The book
resembles one of the anonymous productions of the race rather than
the effort of a single mind; and as for celebrating its centenary we
should as soon think of celebrating the centenaries of Stonehenge
itself. Something of this we may attribute to the fact that we have
all had Robinson Crusoe read aloud to us as children, and were
thus much in the same state of mind towards Defoe and his story that
the Greeks were in towards Homer. It never occurred to us that there
was such a person as Defoe, and to have been told that Robinson
Crusoe was the work of a man with a pen in his hand would either
have disturbed us unpleasantly or meant nothing at all. The
impressions of childhood are those that last longest and cut deepest.
It still seems that the name of Daniel Defoe has no right to appear
upon the title-page of Robinson Crusoe, and if we celebrate
the bi-centenary of the book we are making a slightly unnecessary
allusion to the fact that, like Stonehenge, it is still in
existence.

1 Written 1919.

The great fame of the book has done its author some injustice; for
while it has given him a kind of anonymous glory it has obscured the
fact that he was a writer of other works which, it is safe to assert,
were not read aloud to us as children. Thus when the Editor of the
Christian World in the year 1870 appealed to "the boys and
girls of England" to erect a monument upon the grave of Defoe, which
a stroke of lightning had mutilated, the marble was inscribed to the
memory of the author of Robinson Crusoe. No mention was made
of Moll Flanders. Considering the topics which are dealt with
in that book, and in Roxana, Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack
and the rest, we need not be surprised, though we may be indignant,
at the omission. We may agree with Mr. Wright, the biographer of
Defoe, that these "are not works for the drawing-room table". But
unless we consent to make that useful piece of furniture the final
arbiter of taste, we must deplore the fact that their superficial
coarseness, or the universal celebrity of Robinson Crusoe, has
led them to be far less widely famed than they deserve. On any
monument worthy of the name of monument the names of Moll
Flanders and Roxana, at least, should be carved as deeply
as the name of Defoe. They stand among the few English novels which
we can call indisputably great. The occasion of the bicentenary of
their more famous companion may well lead us to consider in what
their greatness, which has so much in common with his, may be found
to consist.

Defoe was an elderly man when he turned novelist, many years the
predecessor of Richardson and Fielding, and one of the first indeed
to shape the novel and launch it on its way. But it is unnecessary to
labour the fact of his precedence, except that he came to his
novel-writing with certain conceptions about the art which he derived
partly from being himself one of the first to practise it. The novel
had to justify its existence by telling a true story and preaching a
sound moral. "This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most
scandalous crime", he wrote. "It is a sort of lying that makes a
great hole in the heart, in which by degrees a habit of lying enters
in." Either in the preface or in the text of each of his works,
therefore, he takes pains to insist that he has not used his
invention at all but has depended upon facts, and that his purpose
has been the highly moral desire to convert the vicious or to warn
the innocent. Happily these were principles that tallied very well
with his natural disposition and endowments. Facts had been drilled
into him by sixty years of varying fortunes before he turned his
experience to account in fiction. "I have some time ago summed up the
Scenes of my life in this distich," he wrote:

No man has tasted differing fortunes more,
And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.

He had spent eighteen months in Newgate and talked with thieves,
pirates, highwaymen, and coiners before he wrote the history of Moll
Flanders. But to have facts thrust upon you by dint of living and
accident is one thing; to swallow them voraciously and retain the
imprint of them indelibly, is another. It is not merely that Defoe
knew the stress of poverty and had talked with the victims of it, but
that the unsheltered life, exposed to circumstances and forced to
shift for itself, appealed to him imaginatively as the right matter
for his art. In the first pages of each of his great novels he
reduces his hero or heroine to such a state of unfriended misery that
their existence must be a continued struggle, and their survival at
all the result of luck and their own exertions. Moll Flanders was
born in Newgate of a criminal mother; Captain Singleton was stolen as
a child and sold to the gipsies; Colonel Jack, though "born a
gentleman, was put 'prentice to a pickpocket"; Roxana starts under
better auspices, but, having married at fifteen, she sees her husband
go bankrupt and is left with five children in "a condition the most
deplorable that words can express".

Thus each of these boys and girls has the world to begin and the
battle to fight for himself. The situation thus created was entirely
to Defoe's liking. From her very birth or with half a year's respite
at most, Moll Flanders, the most notable of them, is goaded by "that
worst of devils, poverty", forced to earn her living as soon as she
can sew, driven from place to place, making no demands upon her
creator for the subtle domestic atmosphere which he was unable to
supply, but drawing upon him for all he knew of strange people and
customs. From the outset the burden of proving her right to exist is
laid upon her. She has to depend entirely upon her own wits and
judgement, and to deal with each emergency as it arises by a
rule-of-thumb morality which she has forged in her own head. The
briskness of the story is due partly to the fact that having
transgressed the accepted laws at a very early age she has henceforth
the freedom of the outcast. The one impossible event is that she
should settle down in comfort and security. But from the first the
peculiar genius of the author asserts itself, and avoids the obvious
danger of the novel of adventure. He makes us understand that Moll
Flanders was a woman on her own account and not only material for a
succession of adventures. In proof of this she begins, as Roxana also
begins, by falling passionately, if unfortunately, in love. That she
must rouse herself and marry some one else and look very closely to
her settlements and prospects is no slight upon her passion, but to
be laid to the charge of her birth; and, like all Defoe's women, she
is a person of robust understanding. Since she makes no scruple of
telling lies when they serve her purpose, there is something
undeniable about her truth when she speaks it. She has no time to
waste upon the refinements of personal affection; one tear is
dropped, one moment of despair allowed, and then "on with the story".
She has a spirit that loves to breast the storm. She delights in the
exercise of her own powers. When she discovers that the man she has
married in Virginia is her own brother she is violently disgusted;
she insists upon leaving him; but as soon as she sets foot in
Bristol, "I took the diversion of going to Bath, for as I was still
far from being old so my humour, which was always gay; continued so
to an extreme". Heartless she is not, nor can any one charge her with
levity; but life delights her, and a heroine who lives has us all in
tow. Moreover, her ambition has that slight strain of imagination in
it which puts it in the category of the noble passions. Shrewd and
practical of necessity, she is yet haunted by a desire for romance
and for the quality which to her perception makes a man a gentleman.
"It was really a true gallant spirit he was of, and it was the more
grievous to me. 'Tis something of relief even to be undone by a man
of honour rather than by a scoundrel", she writes when she had misled
a highwayman as to the extent of her fortune. It is in keeping with
this temper that she should be proud of her final partner because he
refuses to work when they reach the plantations but prefers hunting,
and that she should take pleasure in buying him wigs and
silver-hilted swords "to make him appear, as he really was, a very
fine gentleman". Her very love of hot weather is in keeping, and the
passion with which she kissed the ground that her son had trod on,
and her noble tolerance of every kind of fault so long as it is not
"complete baseness of spirit, imperious, cruel, and relentless when
uppermost, abject and low-spirited when down". For the rest of the
world she has nothing but good-will.

Since the list of the qualities and graces of this seasoned old
sinner is by no means exhausted we can well understand how it was
that Borrow's apple-woman on London Bridge called her "blessed Mary"
and valued her book above all the apples on her stall; and that
Borrow, taking the book deep into the booth, read till his eyes
ached. But we dwell upon such signs of character only by way of proof
that the creator of Moll Flanders was not, as he has been accused of
being, a mere journalist and literal recorder of facts with no
conception of the nature of psychology. It is true that his
characters take shape and substance of their own accord, as if in
despite of the author and not altogether to his liking. He never
lingers or stresses any point of subtlety or pathos, but presses on
imperturbably as if they came there without his knowledge. A touch of
imagination, such as that when the Prince sits by his son's cradle
and Roxana observes how "he loved to look at it when it was asleep",
seems to mean much more to us than to him. After the curiously modern
dissertation upon the need of communicating matters of importance to
a second person lest, like the thief in Newgate, we should talk of it
in our sleep, he apologises for his digression. He seems to have
taken his characters so deeply into his mind that he lived them
without exactly knowing how; and, like all unconscious artists, he
leaves more gold in his work than his own generation was able to
bring to the surface.

The interpretation that we put on his characters might therefore
well have puzzled him. We find for ourselves meanings which he was
careful to disguise even from his own eye. Thus it comes about that
we admire Moll Flanders far more than we blame her. Nor can we
believe that Defoe had made up his mind as to the precise degree of
her guilt, or was unaware that in considering the lives of the
abandoned he raised many deep questions and hinted, if he did not
state, answers quite at variance with his professions of belief. From
the evidence supplied by his essay upon the "Education of Women" we
know that he had thought deeply and much in advance, of his age upon
the capacities of women, which he rated very high, and the injustice
done to them, which he rated very harsh.

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in
the world, considering us as a civilised and a Christian country,
that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex
every day with folly and impertinence; which I am confident, had they
the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less
than ourselves.

The advocates of women's rights would hardly care, perhaps, to
claim Moll Flanders and Roxana among their patron saints; and yet it
is clear that Defoe not only intended them to speak some very modern
doctrines upon the subject, but placed them in circumstances where
their peculiar hardships are displayed in such a way as to elicit our
sympathy. Courage, said Moll Flanders, was what women needed, and the
power to "stand their ground"; and at once gave practical
demonstration of the benefits that would result. Roxana, a lady of
the same profession, argues more subtly against the slavery of
marriage. She "had started a new thing in the world" the merchant
told her; "it was a way of arguing contrary to the general practise".
But Defoe is the last writer to be guilty of bald preaching. Roxana
keeps our attention because she is blessedly unconscious that she is
in any good sense an example to her sex and is thus at liberty to own
that part of her argument is "of an elevated strain which was really
not in my thoughts at first, at all". The knowledge of her own
frailties and the honest questioning of her own motives, which that
knowledge begets, have the happy result of keeping her fresh and
human when the martyrs and pioneers of so many problem novels have
shrunken and shrivelled to the pegs and props of their respective
creeds.

But the claim of Defoe upon our admiration does not rest upon the
fact that he can be shown to have anticipated some of the views of
Meredith, or to have written scenes which (the odd suggestion occurs)
might have been turned into plays by Ibsen. Whatever his ideas upon
the position of women, they are an incidental result of his chief
virtue, which is that he deals with the important and lasting side of
things and not with the passing and trivial. He is often dull. He can
imitate the matter-of-fact precision of a scientific traveller until
we wonder that his pen could trace or his brain conceive what has not
even the excuse of truth to soften its dryness. He leaves out the
whole of vegetable nature, and a large part of human nature. All this
we may admit, though we have to admit defects as grave in many
writers whom we call great. But that does not impair the peculiar
merit of what remains. Having at the outset limited his scope and
confined his ambitions he achieves a truth of insight which is far
rarer and more enduring than the truth of fact which he professed to
make his aim. Moll Flanders and her friends recommended themselves to
him not because they were, as we should say, "picturesque"; nor, as
he affirmed, because they were examples of evil living by which the
public might profit. It was their natural veracity, bred in them by a
life of hardship, that excited his interest. For them there were no
excuses; no kindly shelter obscured their motives. Poverty was their
taskmaster. Defoe did not pronounce more than a judgement of the lips
upon their failings. But their courage and resource and tenacity
delighted him. He found their society full of good talk, and pleasant
stories, and faith in each other, and morality of a home-made kind.
Their fortunes had that infinite variety which he praised and
relished and beheld with wonder in his own life. These men and women,
above all, were free to talk openly of the passions and desires which
have moved men and women since the beginning of time, and thus even
now they keep their vitality undiminished. There is a dignity in
everything that is looked at openly. Even the sordid subject of
money, which plays so large a part in their histories, becomes not
sordid but tragic when it stands not for ease and consequence but for
honour, honesty, and life itself. You may object that Defoe is
humdrum, but never that he is engrossed with petty things.

He belongs, indeed, to the school of the great plain writers,
whose work is founded upon a knowledge of what is most persistent,
though not most seductive, in human nature. The view of London from
Hungerford Bridge, grey, serious, massive, and full of the subdued
stir of traffic and business, prosaic if it were not for the masts of
the ships and the towers and domes of the city, brings him to mind.
The tattered girls with violets in their hands at the street corners,
and the old weather-beaten women patiently displaying their matches
and bootlaces beneath the shelter of arches, seem like characters
from his books. He is of the school of Crabbe and of Gissing, and not
merely a fellow-pupil in the same stern place of learning, but its
founder and master.

In July, 1843, Lord Macaulay pronounced the opinion that Joseph
Addison had enriched our literature with compositions "that will live
as long as the English language". But when Lord Macaulay pronounced
an opinion it was not merely an opinion. Even now, at a distance of
seventy-six years, the words seem to issue from the mouth of the
chosen representative of the people. There is an authority about
them, a sonority, a sense of responsibility, which put us in mind of
a Prime Minister making a proclamation on behalf of a great empire
rather than of a journalist writing about a deceased man of letters
for a magazine. The article upon Addison is, indeed, one of the most
vigorous of the famous essays. Florid, and at the same time extremely
solid, the phrases seem to build up a monument, at once square and
lavishly festooned with ornament, which should serve Addison for
shelter so long as one stone of Westminster Abbey stands upon
another. Yet, though we may have read and admired this particular
essay times out of number (as we say when we have read anything three
times over), it has never occurred to us, strangely enough, to
believe that it is true. That is apt to happen to the admiring reader
of Macaulay's essays. While delighting in their richness, force, and
variety, and finding every judgement, however emphatic, proper in its
place, it seldom occurs to us to connect these sweeping assertions
and undeniable convictions with anything so minute as a human being.
So it is with Addison. "If we wish", Macaulay writes, "to find
anything more vivid than Addison's best portraits, we must go either
to Shakespeare or to Cervantes". "We have not the least doubt that if
Addison had written a novel on an extensive plan it would have been
superior to any that we possess." His essays, again, "fully entitle
him to the rank of a great poet"; and, to complete the edifice, we
have Voltaire proclaimed "the prince of buffoons", and together with
Swift forced to stoop so low that Addison takes rank above them both
as a humorist.

1 Written in 1919.

Examined separately, such flourishes of ornament look grotesque
enough, but in their place--such is the persuasive power of
design--they are part of the decoration; they complete the monument.
Whether Addison or another is interred within, it is a very fine
tomb. But now that two centuries have passed since the real body of
Addison was laid by night under the Abbey floor, we are, through no
merit of our own, partially qualified to test the first of the
flourishes on that fictitious tombstone to which, though it may be
empty, we have done homage, in a formal kind of way, these
sixty-seven years. The compositions of Addison will live as long as
the English language. Since every moment brings proof that our mother
tongue is more lusty and lively than sorts with complete sedateness
or chastity, we need only concern ourselves with the vitality of
Addison. Neither lusty nor lively is the adjective we should apply to
the present condition of the Tatler and the Spectator.
To take a rough test, it is possible to discover how many people in
the course of a year borrow Addison's works from the public library,
and a particular instance affords us the not very encouraging
information that during nine years two people yearly take out the
first volume of the Spectator. The second volume is less in
request than the first. The inquiry is not a cheerful one. From
certain marginal comments and pencil marks it seems that these rare
devotees seek out only the famous passages and, as their habit is,
score what we are bold enough to consider the least admirable
phrases. No; if Addison lives at all, it is not in the public
libraries. It is in libraries that are markedly private, secluded,
shaded by lilac trees and brown with folios, that he still draws his
faint, regular breath. If any man or woman is going to solace himself
with a page of Addison before the June sun is out of the sky to-day,
it is in some such pleasant retreat as this.

Yet all over England at intervals, perhaps wide ones, we may be
sure that there are people engaged in reading Addison, whatever the
year or season. For Addison is very well worth reading. The
temptation to read Pope on Addison, Macaulay on Addison, Thackeray on
Addison, Johnson on Addison rather than Addison himself is to be
resisted, for you will find, if you study the Tatler and the
Spectator, glance at Cato, and run through the
remainder of the six moderate-sized volumes, that Addison is neither
Pope's Addison nor anybody else's Addison, but a separate,
independent individual still capable of casting a clear-cut shape of
himself upon the consciousness, turbulent and distracted as it is, of
nineteen hundred and nineteen. It is true that the fate of the lesser
shades is always a little precarious. They are so easily obscured or
distorted. It seems so often scarcely worth while to go through the
cherishing and humanising process which is necessary to get into
touch with a writer of the second class who may, after all, have
little to give us. The earth is crusted over them; their features are
obliterated, and perhaps it is not a head of the best period that we
rub clean in the end, but only the chip of an old pot. The chief
difficulty with the lesser writers, however, is not only the effort.
It is that our standards have changed. The things that they like are
not the things that we like; and as the charm of their writing
depends much more upon taste than upon conviction, a change of
manners is often quite enough to put us out of touch altogether. That
is one of the most troublesome barriers between ourselves and
Addison. He attached great importance to certain qualities. He had a
very precise notion of what we are used to call "niceness" in man or
woman. He was extremely fond of saying that men ought not to be
atheists, and that women ought not to wear large petticoats. This
directly inspires in us not so much a sense of distaste as a sense of
difference. Dutifully, if at all, we strain our imaginations to
conceive the kind of audience to whom these precepts were addressed.
The Tatler was published in 1709; the Spectator a year
or two later. What was the state of England at that particular
moment? Why was Addison so anxious to insist upon the necessity of a
decent and cheerful religious belief? Why did he so constantly, and
in the main kindly, lay stress upon the foibles of women and their
reform? Why was he so deeply impressed with the evils of party
government? Any historian will explain; but it is always a misfortune
to have to call in the services of any historian. A writer should
give us direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into
the wine. As it is, we can only feel that these counsels are
addressed to ladies in hoops and gentlemen in wigs--a vanished
audience which has learnt its lesson and gone its way and the
preacher with it. We can only smile and marvel and perhaps admire the
clothes.

And that is not the way to read. To be thinking that dead people
deserved these censures and admired this morality, judged the
eloquence, which we find so frigid, sublime, the philosophy to us so
superficial, profound, to take a collector's joy in such signs of
antiquity, is to treat literature as if it were a broken jar of
undeniable age but doubtful beauty, to be stood in a cabinet behind
glass doors. The charm which still makes Cato very readable is
much of this nature. When Syphax exclaims,

So, where our wide Numidian wastes extend,
Sudden, th'impetuous hurricanes descend,
Wheel through the air, in circling eddies play,
Tear up the sands, and sweep whole plains away.
The helpless traveller, with wild surprise,
Sees the dry desert all around him rise,
And smother'd in the dusty whirlwind dies,

we cannot help imagining the thrill in the crowded theatre, the
feathers nodding emphatically on the ladies' heads, the gentlemen
leaning forward to tap their canes, and every one exclaiming to his
neighbour how vastly fine it is and crying "Bravo!" But how can
we be excited? And so with Bishop Hurd and his notes--his
"finely observed", his "wonderfully exact, both in the sentiment and
expression", his serene confidence that when "the present humour of
idolising Shakespeare is over", the time will come when Cato
is "supremely admired by all candid and judicious critics". This is
all very amusing and productive of pleasant fancies, both as to the
faded frippery of our ancestors' minds and the bold opulence of our
own. But it is not the intercourse of equals, let alone that other
kind of intercourse, which as it makes us contemporary with the
author, persuades us that his object is our own. Occasionally in
Cato one may pick up a few lines that are not obsolete; but
for the most part the tragedy which Dr. Johnson thought
"unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius" has
become collector's literature.

Perhaps most readers approach the essays also with some suspicion
as to the need of condescension in their minds. The question to be
asked is whether Addison, attached as he was to certain standards of
gentility, morality, and taste, has not become one of those people of
exemplary character and charming urbanity who must never be talked to
about anything more exciting than the weather. We have some slight
suspicion that the Spectator and the Tatler are nothing
but talk, couched in perfect English, about the number of fine days
this year compared with the number of wet the year before. The
difficulty of getting on to equal terms with him is shown by the
little fable which he introduces into one of the early numbers of the
Tatler, of "a young gentleman, of moderate understanding, but
great vivacity, who . . . had got a little smattering of knowledge,
just enough to make an atheist or a freethinker, but not a
philosopher, or a man of sense". This young gentleman visits his
father in the country, and proceeds "to enlarge the narrowness of the
country notions; in which he succeeded so well, that he had seduced
the butler by his table-talk, and staggered his eldest sister. . . .
'Till one day, talking of his setting dog . . . said 'he did not
question but Tray was as immortal as any one of the family'; and in
the heat of the argument told his father, that for his own part, 'he
expected to die like a dog'. Upon which, the old man, starting up in
a very great passion, cried out, 'Then, sirrah, you shall live like
one'; and taking his cane in his hand, cudgelled him out of his
system. This had so good an effect upon him, that he took up from
that day, fell to reading good books, and is now a bencher in the
Middle-Temple". There is a good deal of Addison in that story: his
dislike of "dark and uncomfortable prospects"; his respect for
"principles which are the support, happiness, and glory of all public
societies, as well as private persons"; his solicitude for the
butler; and his conviction that to read good books and become a
bencher in the Middle-Temple is the proper end for a very vivacious
young gentleman. This Mr. Addison married a countess, "gave his
little senate laws", and, sending for young Lord Warwick, made that
famous remark about seeing how a Christian can die which has fallen
upon such evil days that our sympathies are with the foolish, and
perhaps fuddled, young peer rather than with the frigid gentleman,
not too far gone for a last spasm of self-complacency, upon the
bed.

Let us rub off such incrustations, so far as they are due to the
corrosion of Pope's wit or the deposit of mid-Victorian lachrymosity,
and see what, for us in our time, remains. In the first place, there
remains the not despicable virtue, after two centuries of existence,
of being readable. Addison can fairly lay claim to that; and then,
slipped in on the tide of the smooth, well-turned prose, are little
eddies, diminutive waterfalls, agreeably diversifying the polished
surface. We begin to take note of whims, fancies, peculiarities on
the part of the essayist which light up the prim, impeccable
countenance of the moralist and convince us that, however tightly he
may have pursed his lips, his eyes are very bright and not so shallow
after all. He is alert to his finger-tips. Little muffs, silver
garters, fringed gloves draw his attention; he observes with a keen,
quick glance, not unkindly, and full rather of amusement than of
censure. To be sure, the age was rich in follies. Here were
coffee-houses packed with politicians talking of Kings and Emperors
and letting their own small affairs go to ruin. Crowds applauded the
Italian opera every night without understanding a word of it. Critics
discoursed of the unities. Men gave a thousand pounds for a handful
of tulip roots. As for women--or "the fair sex", as Addison liked to
call them--their follies were past counting. He did his best to count
them, with a loving particularity which roused the ill-humour of
Swift. But he did it very charmingly, with a natural relish for the
task, as the following passage shows:

I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be
adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks.
The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the
peacock, parrot, and swan, shall pay contributions to her muff; the
sea shall be searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every
part of nature furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a
creature that is the most consummate work of it. All this I shall
indulge them in; but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I
neither can nor will allow it.

In all these matters Addison was on the side of sense and taste
and civilisation. Of that little fraternity, often so obscure and yet
so indispensable, who in every age keep themselves alive to the
importance of art and letters and music, watching, discriminating,
denouncing and delighting, Addison was one--distinguished and
strangely contemporary with ourselves. It would have been, so one
imagines, a great pleasure to take him a manuscript; a great
enlightenment, as well as a great honour, to have his opinion. In
spite of Pope, one fancies that his would have been criticism of the
best order, open-minded and generous to novelty, and yet, in the
final resort, unfaltering in its standards. The boldness which is a
proof of vigour is shown by his defence of "Chevy Chase". He had so
clear a notion of what he meant by the "very spirit and soul of fine
writing" as to track it down in an old barbarous ballad or rediscover
it in "that divine work" "Paradise Lost". Moreover, far from being a
connoisseur only of the still, settled beauties of the dead, he was
aware of the present; a severe critic of its "Gothic taste", vigilant
in protecting the rights and honours of the language, and all in
favour of simplicity and quiet. Here we have the Addison of Will's
and Button's, who, sitting late into the night and drinking more than
was good for him, gradually overcame his taciturnity and began to
talk. Then he "chained the attention of every one to him". "Addison's
conversation", said Pope, "had something in it more charming than I
have found in any other man." One can well believe it, for his essays
at their best preserve the very cadence of easy yet exquisitely
modulated conversation--the smile checked before it has broadened
into laughter, the thought lightly turned from frivolity or
abstraction, the ideas springing, bright, new, various, with the
utmost spontaneity. He seems to speak what comes into his head, and
is never at the trouble of raising his voice. But he has described
himself in the character of the lute better than any one can do it
for him.

The lute is a character directly opposite to the drum, that sounds
very finely by itself, or in a very small concert. Its notes are
exquisitely sweet, and very low, easily drowned in a multitude of
instruments, and even lost among a few, unless you give a particular
attention to it. A lute is seldom heard in a company of more than
five, whereas a drum will show itself to advantage in an assembly of
500. The lutanists, therefore, are men of a fine genius, uncommon
reflection, great affability, and esteemed chiefly by persons of a
good taste, who are the only proper judges of so delightful and soft
a melody.

Addison was a lutanist. No praise, indeed, could be less
appropriate than Lord Macaulay's. To call Addison on the strength of
his essays a great poet, or to prophesy that if he had written a
novel on an extensive plan it would have been "superior to any that
we possess", is to confuse him with the drums and trumpets; it is not
merely to overpraise his merits, but to overlook them. Dr. Johnson
superbly, and, as his manner is, once and for all has summed up the
quality of Addison's poetic genius:

His poetry is first to be considered; of which it must be
confessed that it has not often those felicities of diction which
give lustre to sentiments, or that vigour of sentiment that animates
diction; there is little of ardour, vehemence, or transport; there is
very rarely the awfulness of grandeur, and not very often the
splendour of elegance. He thinks justly; but he thinks faintly.

The Sir Roger de Coverley papers are those which have the most
resemblance, on the surface, to a novel. But their merit consists in
the fact that they do not adumbrate, or initiate, or anticipate
anything; they exist, perfect, complete, entire in themselves. To
read them as if they were a first hesitating experiment containing
the seed of greatness to come is to miss the peculiar point of them.
They are studies done from the outside by a quiet spectator. When
read together they compose a portrait of the Squire and his circle
all in characteristic positions--one with his rod, another with his
hounds--but each can be detached from the rest without damage to the
design or harm to himself. In a novel, where each chapter gains from
the one before it or adds to the one that follows it, such
separations would be intolerable. The speed, the intricacy, the
design, would be mutilated. These particular qualities are perhaps
lacking, but nevertheless Addison's method has great advantages. Each
of these essays is very highly finished. The characters are defined
by a succession of extremely neat, clean strokes. Inevitably, where
the sphere is so narrow--an essay is only three or four pages in
length--there is not room for great depth or intricate subtlety.
Here, from the Spectator, is a good example of the witty and
decisive manner in which Addison strikes out a portrait to fill the
little frame:

Sombrius is one of these sons of sorrow. He thinks himself obliged
in duty to be sad and disconsolate. He looks on a sudden fit of
laughter as a breach of his baptismal vow. An innocent jest startles
him like blasphemy. Tell him of one who is advanced to a title of
honour, he lifts up his hands and eyes; describe a public ceremony,
he shakes his head; shew him a gay equipage, he blesses himself. All
the little ornaments of life are pomps and vanities. Mirth is wanton,
and wit profane. He is scandalized at youth for being lively, and at
childhood for being playful. He sits at a christening, or at a
marriage-feast, as at a funeral; sighs at the conclusion of a merry
story, and grows devout when the rest of the company grow pleasant.
After all Sombrius is a religious man, and would have behaved himself
very properly, had he lived when Christianity was under a general
persecution.

The novel is not a development from that model, for the good
reason that no development along these lines is possible. Of its kind
such a portrait is perfect; and when we find, scattered up and down
the Spectator and the Tatler, numbers of such little
masterpieces with fancies and anecdotes in the same style, some doubt
as to the narrowness of such a sphere becomes inevitable. The form of
the essay admits of its own particular perfection; and if anything is
perfect the exact dimensions of its perfection become immaterial. One
can scarcely settle whether, on the whole, one prefers a raindrop to
the River Thames. When we have said all that we can say against
them--that many are dull, others superficial, the allegories faded,
the piety conventional, the morality trite--there still remains the
fact that the essays of Addison are perfect essays. Always at the
highest point of any art there comes a moment when everything seems
in a conspiracy to help the artist, and his achievement becomes a
natural felicity on his part of which he seems, to a later age,
half-unconscious. So Addison, writing day after day, essay after
essay, knew instinctively and exactly how to do it. Whether it was a
high thing, or whether it was a low thing, whether an epic is more
profound or a lyric more passionate, undoubtedly it is due to Addison
that prose is now prosaic--the medium which makes it possible for
people of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the
world. Addison is the respectable ancestor of an innumerable progeny.
Pick up the first weekly journal and the article upon the "Delights
of Summer" or the "Approach of Age" will show his influence. But it
will also show, unless the name of Mr. Max Beerbohm, our solitary
essayist, is attached to it, that we have lost the art of writing
essays. What with our views and our virtues, our passions and
profundities, the shapely silver drop, that held the sky in it and so
many bright little visions of human life, is now nothing but a
hold-all knobbed with luggage packed in a hurry. Even so, the
essayist will make an effort, perhaps without knowing it, to write
like Addison.

In his temperate and reasonable way Addison more than once amused
himself with speculations as to the fate of his writings. He had a
just idea of their nature and value. "I have new-pointed all the
batteries of ridicule", he wrote. Yet, because so many of his darts
had been directed against ephemeral follies, "absurd fashions,
ridiculous customs, and affected forms of speech", the time would
come, in a hundred years, perhaps, when his essays, he thought, would
be "like so many pieces of old plate, where the weight will be
regarded, but the fashion lost". Two hundred years have passed; the
plate is worn smooth; the pattern almost rubbed out; but the metal is
pure silver.

Five shillings, perhaps, will secure a life subscription to this
faded, out-of-date, obsolete library, which, with a little help from
the rates, is chiefly subsidised from the shelves of clergymen's
widows, and country gentlemen inheriting more books than their wives
like to dust. In the middle of the wide airy room, with windows that
look to the sea and let in the shouts of men crying pilchards for
sale on the cobbled street below, a row of vases stands, in which
specimens of the local flowers droop, each with its name inscribed
beneath. The elderly, the marooned, the bored, drift from newspaper
to newspaper, or sit holding their heads over back numbers of The
Illustrated London News and the Wesleyan Chronicle. No one
has spoken aloud here since the room was opened in 1854. The obscure
sleep on the walls, slouching against each other as if they were too
drowsy to stand upright. Their backs are flaking off; their titles
often vanished. Why disturb their sleep? Why reopen those peaceful
graves, the librarian seems to ask, peering over his spectacles, and
resenting the duty, which indeed has become laborious, of retrieving
from among those nameless tombstones Nos. 1763, 1080, and 606.

TAYLORS AND EDGEWORTHS

For one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing
with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded
ghost--a Mrs. Pilkington, a Rev. Henry Elman, a Mrs. Ann
Gilbert--waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom.
Possibly they hear one coming. They shuffle, they preen, they bridle.
Old secrets well up to their lips. The divine relief of communication
will soon again be theirs. The dust shifts and Mrs. Gilbert--but the
contact with life is instantly salutary. Whatever Mrs. Gilbert may be
doing, she is not thinking about us. Far from it. Colchester, about
the year 1800, was for the young Taylors, as Kensington had been for
their mother, "a very Elysium". There were the Strutts, the Hills,
the Stapletons; there was poetry, philosophy, engraving. For the
young Taylors were brought up to work hard, and if, after a long
day's toil upon their father's pictures, they slipped round to dine
with the Strutts, they had a right to their pleasure. Already they
had won prizes in Darton and Harvey's pocket-book. One of the Strutts
knew James Montgomery, and there was talk, at those gay parties, with
the Moorish decorations and all the cats--for old Ben Strutt was a
bit of a character: did not communicate; would not let his daughters
eat meat, so no wonder they died of consumption--there was talk of
printing a joint volume to be called The Associate Minstrels,
to which James, if not Robert himself, might contribute. The
Stapletons were poetical, too. Moira and Bithia would wander over the
old town wall at Balkerne Hill reading poetry by moonlight. Perhaps
there was a little too much poetry in Colchester in 1800. Looking
back in the middle of a prosperous and vigorous life, Ann had to
lament many broken careers, much unfulfilled promise. The Stapletons
died young, perverted, miserable; Jacob, with his "dark,
scorn-speaking countenance", who had vowed that he would spend the
night looking for Ann's lost bracelet in the street, disappeared,
"and I last heard of him vegetating among the ruins of Rome--himself
too much a ruin"; as for the Hills, their fate was worst of all. To
submit to public baptism was flighty, but to marry Captain M.!
Anybody could have warned pretty Fanny Hill against Captain M. Yet
off she drove with him in his fine phaeton. For years nothing more
was heard of her. Then one night, when the Taylors had moved to Ongar
and old Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were sitting over the fire, thinking how,
as it was nine o'clock, and the moon was full, they ought, according
to their promise, to look at it and think of their absent children,
there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Taylor went down to open it. But
who was this sad, shabby-looking woman outside? "Oh, don't you
remember the Strutts and the Stapletons, and how you warned me
against Captain M.?" cried Fanny Hill, for it was Fanny Hill--poor
Fanny Hill, all worn and sunk; poor Fanny Hill, that used to be so
sprightly. She was living in a lone house not far from the Taylors,
forced to drudge for her husband's mistress, for Captain M. had
wasted all her fortune, ruined all her life.

Ann married Mr. G., of course--of course. The words toll
persistently through these obscure volumes. For in the vast world to
which the memoir writers admit us there is a solemn sense of
something unescapable, of a wave gathering beneath the frail flotilla
and carrying it on. One thinks of Colchester in 1800. Scribbling
verses, reading Montgomery--so they begin; the Hills, the Stapletons,
the Strutts disperse and disappear as one knew they would; but here,
after long years, is Ann still scribbling, and at last here is the
poet Montgomery himself in her very house, and she begging him to
consecrate her child to poetry by just holding him in his arms, and
he refusing (for he is a bachelor), but taking her for a walk, and
they hear the thunder, and she thinks it the artillery, and he says
in a voice which she will never, never forget: "Yes! The artillery of
Heaven!" It is one of the attractions of the unknown, their
multitude, their vastness; for, instead of keeping their identity
separate, as remarkable people do, they seem to merge into one
another, their very boards and title-pages and frontispieces
dissolving, and their innumerable pages melting into continuous years
so that we can lie back and look up into the fine mist-like substance
of countless lives, and pass unhindered from century to century, from
life to life. Scenes detach themselves. We watch groups. Here is
young Mr. Elman talking to Miss Biffen at Brighton. She has neither
arms nor legs; a footman carries her in and out. She teaches
miniature painting to his sister. Then he is in the stage coach on
the road to Oxford with Newman. Newman says nothing. Elman
nevertheless reflects that he has known all the great men of his
time. And so back and so forwards, he paces eternally the fields of
Sussex until, grown to an extreme old age, there he sits in his
Rectory thinking of Newman, thinking of Miss Biffen, and making--it
is his great consolation--string bags for missionaries. And then? Go
on looking. Nothing much happens. But the dim light is exquisitely
refreshing to the eyes. Let us watch little Miss Frend trotting along
the Strand with her father. They meet a man with very bright eyes.
"Mr. Blake", says Mr. Frend. It is Mrs. Dyer who pours out tea for
them in Clifford's Inn. Mr. Charles Lamb has just left the room. Mrs.
Dyer says she married George because his washerwoman cheated him so.
What do you think George paid for his shirts, she asks? Gently,
beautifully, like the clouds of a balmy evening, obscurity once more
traverses the sky, an obscurity which is not empty but thick with the
star dust of innumerable lives. And suddenly there is a rift in it,
and we see a wretched little packet-boat pitching off the Irish coast
in the middle of the nineteenth century. There is an unmistakable air
of 1840 about the tarpaulins and the hairy monsters in sou'westers
lurching and spitting over the sloping decks, yet treating the
solitary young woman who stands in shawl and poke bonnet gazing,
gazing, not without kindness. No, no, no! She will not leave the
deck. She will stand there till it is quite dark, thank you! "Her
great love of the sea . . . drew this exemplary wife and mother every
now and then irresistibly away from home. No one but her husband knew
where she had gone, and her children learnt only later in life that
on these occasions, when suddenly she disappeared for a few days, she
was taking short sea voyages . . ." a crime which she expiated by
months of work among the Midland poor. Then the craving would come
upon her, would be confessed in private to her husband, and off she
stole again--the mother of Sir George Newnes.

One would conclude that human beings were happy, endowed with such
blindness to fate, so indefatigable an interest in their own
activities, were it not for those sudden and astonishing apparitions
staring in at us, all taut and pale in their determination never to
be forgotten, men who have just missed fame, men who have
passionately desired redress--men like Haydon, and Mark Pattison, and
the Rev. Blanco White. And in the whole world there is probably but
one person who looks up for a moment and tries to interpret the
menacing face, the furious beckoning fist, before, in the multitude
of human affairs, fragments of faces, echoes of voices, flying
coat-tails, and bonnet strings disappearing down the shrubbery walks,
one's attention is distracted for ever. What is that enormous wheel,
for example, careering downhill in Berkshire in the eighteenth
century? It runs faster and faster; suddenly a youth jumps out from
within; next moment it leaps over the edge of a chalk pit and is
dashed to smithereens. This is Edgeworth's doing--Richard Lovell
Edgeworth, we mean, the portentous bore.

For that is the way he has come down to us in his two volumes of
memoirs--Byron's bore, Day's friend, Maria's father, the man who
almost invented the telegraph, and did, in fact, invent machines for
cutting turnips, climbing walls, contracting on narrow bridges and
lifting their wheels over obstacles--a man meritorious, industrious,
advanced, but still, as we investigate his memoirs, mainly a bore.
Nature endowed him with irrepressible energy. The blood coursed
through his veins at least twenty times faster than the normal rate.
His face was red, round, vivacious. His brain raced. His tongue never
stopped talking. He had married four wives and had nineteen children,
including the novelist Maria. Moreover, he had known every one and
done everything. His energy burst open the most secret doors and
penetrated to the most private apartments. His wife's grandmother,
for instance, disappeared mysteriously every day. Edgeworth blundered
in upon her and found her, with her white locks flowing and her eyes
streaming, in prayer before a crucifix. She was a Roman Catholic
then, but why a penitent? He found out somehow that her husband had
been killed in a duel, and she had married the man who killed him.
"The consolations of religion are fully equal to its terrors", Dick
Edgeworth reflected as he stumbled out again. Then there was the
beautiful young woman in the castle among the forests of Dauphiny.
Half paralysed, unable to speak above a whisper, there she lay when
Edgeworth broke in and found her reading. Tapestries flapped on the
castle walls; fifty thousand bats--"odious animals whose stench is
uncommonly noisome"--hung in clusters in the caves beneath. None of
the inhabitants understood a word she said. But to the Englishman she
talked for hour after hour about books and politics and religion. He
listened; no doubt he talked. He sat dumbfounded. But what could one
do for her? Alas, one must leave her lying among the tusks, and the
old men, and the cross-bows, reading, reading, reading. For Edgeworth
was employed in turning the Rhone from its course. He must get back
to his job. One reflection he would make. "I determined on steadily
persevering in the cultivation of my understanding."

He was impervious to the romance of the situations in which he
found himself. Every experience served only to fortify his character.
He reflected, he observed, he improved himself daily. You can
improve, Mr. Edgeworth used to tell his children, every day of your
life. "He used to say that with this power of improving they might in
time be anything, and without it in time they would be nothing."
Imperturbable, indefatigable, daily increasing in sturdy
self-assurance, he has the gift of the egoist. He brings out, as he
bustles and bangs on his way, the diffident, shrinking figures who
would otherwise be drowned in darkness. The aged lady, whose private
penance he disturbed, is only one of a series of figures who start up
on either side of his progress, mute, astonished, showing us in a way
that is even now unmistakable, their amazement at this well-meaning
man who bursts in upon them at their studies and interrupts their
prayers. We see him through their eyes; we see him as he does not
dream of being seen. What a tyrant he was to his first wife! How
intolerably she suffered! But she never utters a word. It is Dick
Edgeworth who tells her story in complete ignorance that he is doing
anything of the kind. "It was a singular trait of character in my
wife," he observes, "who had never shown any uneasiness at my
intimacy with Sir Francis Delaval, that she should take a strong
dislike to Mr. Day. A more dangerous and seductive companion than the
one, or a more moral and improving companion than the other, could
not be found in England." It was, indeed, very singular.

For the first Mrs. Edgeworth was a penniless girl, the daughter of
a ruined country gentleman, who sat over his fire picking cinders
from the hearth and throwing them into the grate, while from time to
time he ejaculated "Hein! Heing!" as yet another scheme for making
his fortune came into his head. She had had no education. An
itinerant writing-master had taught her to form a few words. When
Dick Edgeworth was an undergraduate and rode over from Oxford she
fell in love with him and married him in order to escape the poverty
and the mystery and the dirt, and to have a husband and children like
other women. But with what result? Gigantic wheels ran downhill with
the bricklayer's son inside them. Sailing carriages took flight and
almost wrecked four stage coaches. Machines did cut turnips, but not
very efficiently. Her little boy was allowed to roam the country like
a poor man's son, bare-legged, untaught. And Mr. Day, coming to
breakfast and staying to dinner, argued incessantly about scientific
principles and the laws of nature.

But here we encounter one of the pitfalls of this nocturnal
rambling among forgotten worthies. It is so difficult to keep, as we
must with highly authenticated people, strictly to the facts. It is
so difficult to refrain from making scenes which, if the past could
be recalled, might perhaps be found lacking in accuracy. With a
character like Thomas Day, in particular, whose history surpasses the
bounds of the credible, we find ourselves oozing amazement, like a
sponge which has absorbed so much that it can retain no more but
fairly drips. Certain scenes have the fascination which belongs
rather to the abundance of fiction than to the sobriety of fact. For
instance, we conjure up all the drama of poor Mrs. Edgeworth's daily
life; her bewilderment, her loneliness, her despair, how she must
have wondered whether any one really wanted machines to climb walls,
and assured the gentlemen that turnips were better cut simply with a
knife, and so blundered and floundered and been snubbed that she
dreaded the almost daily arrival of the tall young man with his
pompous, melancholy face, marked by the smallpox, his profusion of
uncombed black hair, and his finical cleanliness of hands and person.
He talked fast, fluently, incessantly, for hours at a time about
philosophy and nature, and M. Rousseau. Yet it was her house; she had
to see to his meals, and, though he ate as though he were half
asleep, his appetite was enormous. But it was no use complaining to
her husband. Edgeworth said, "She lamented about trifles". He went on
to say: "The lamenting of a female with whom we live does not render
home delightful". And then, with his obtuse open-mindedness, he asked
her what she had to complain of. Did he ever leave her alone? In the
five or six years of their married life he had slept from home not
more than five or six times. Mr. Day could corroborate that. Mr. Day
corroborated everything that Mr. Edgeworth said. He egged him on with
his experiments. He told him to leave his son without education. He
did not care a rap what the people of Henley said. In short, he was
at the bottom of all the absurdities and extravagances which made
Mrs. Edgeworth's life a burden to her.

Yet let us choose another scene--one of the last that poor Mrs.
Edgeworth was to behold. She was returning from Lyons, and Mr. Day
was her escort. A more singular figure, as he stood on the deck of
the packet which took them to Dover, very tall, very upright, one
finger in the breast of his coat, letting the wind blow his hair out,
dressed absurdly, though in the height of fashion, wild, romantic,
yet at the same time authoritative and pompous, could scarcely be
imagined; and this strange creature, who loathed women, was in charge
of a lady who was about to become a mother, had adopted two orphan
girls, and had set himself to win the hand of Miss Elizabeth Sneyd by
standing between boards for six hours daily in order to learn to
dance. Now and again he pointed his toe with rigid precision; then,
waking from the congenial dream into which the dark clouds, the
flying waters, and the shadow of England upon the horizon had thrown
him, he rapped out an order in the smart, affected tones of a man of
the world. The sailors stared, but they obeyed. There was something
sincere about him, something proudly indifferent to what you thought;
yes, something comforting and humane, too, so that Mrs. Edgeworth for
her part was determined never to laugh at him again. But men were
strange; life was difficult, and with a sigh of bewilderment, perhaps
of relief, poor Mrs. Edgeworth landed at Dover, was brought to bed of
a daughter, and died.

Day meanwhile proceeded to Lichfield. Elizabeth Sneyd, of course,
refused him--gave a great cry, people said; exclaimed that she had
loved Day the blackguard, but hated Day the gentleman, and rushed
from the room. And then, they said, a terrible thing happened. Mr.
Day, in his rage, bethought him of the orphan, Sabrina Sydney, whom
he had bred to be his wife; visited her at Sutton Coldfield; flew
into a passion at the sight of her; fired a pistol at her skirts,
poured melted sealing-wax over her arms, and boxed her ears. "No; I
could never have done that", Mr. Edgeworth used to say, when people
described the scene. And whenever, to the end of his life, he thought
of Thomas Day, he fell silent. So great, so passionate, so
inconsistent--his life had been a tragedy, and in thinking of his
friend, the best friend he had ever had, Richard Edgeworth fell
silent.

It is almost the only occasion upon which silence is recorded of
him. To muse, to repent, to contemplate were foreign to his nature.
His wife and friends and children are silhouetted with extreme
vividness upon a broad disc of interminable chatter. Upon no other
background could we realise so clearly the sharp fragment of his
first wife, or the shades and depths which make up the character, at
once humane and brutal, advanced and hidebound, of the inconsistent
philosopher, Thomas Day. But his power is not limited to people;
landscapes, groups, societies seem, even as he describes them, to
split off from him, to be projected away, so that we are able to run
just ahead of him and anticipate his coming. They are brought out all
the more vividly by the extreme incongruity which so often marks his
comment and stamps his presence; they live with a peculiar beauty,
fantastic, solemn, mysterious, in contrast with Edgeworth, who is
none of these things. In particular, he brings before us a garden in
Cheshire, the garden of a parsonage, an ancient but commodious
parsonage.

One pushed through a white gate and found oneself in a grass
court, small but well kept, with roses growing in the hedges and
grapes hanging from the walls. But what, in the name of wonder, were
those objects in the middle of the grass plot? Through the dusk of an
autumn evening there shone out an enormous white globe. Round it at
various distances were others of different sizes--the planets and
their satellites, it seemed. But who could have placed them there,
and why? The house was silent; the windows shut; nobody was stirring.
Then, furtively peeping from behind a curtain, appeared for a second
the face of an elderly man, handsome, dishevelled, distraught. It
vanished.

In some mysterious way, human beings inflict their own vagaries
upon nature. Moths and birds must have flitted more silently through
the little garden; over everything must have brooded the same
fantastic peace. Then, red-faced, garrulous, inquisitive, in burst
Richard Lovell Edgeworth. He looked at the globes; he satisfied
himself that they were of "accurate design and workmanlike
construction". He knocked at the door. He knocked and knocked. No one
came. At length, as his impatience was overcoming him, slowly the
latch was undone, gradually the door was opened; a clergyman,
neglected, unkempt, but still a gentleman, stood before him.
Edgeworth named himself, and they retired to a parlour littered with
books and papers and valuable furniture now fallen to decay. At last,
unable to control his curiosity any longer, Edgeworth asked what were
the globes in the garden? Instantly the clergyman displayed extreme
agitation. It was his son who had made them, he exclaimed; a boy of
genius, a boy of the greatest industry, and of virtue and
acquirements far beyond his age. But he had died. His wife had died.
Edgeworth tried to turn the conversation, but in vain. The poor man
rushed on passionately, incoherently about his son, his genius, his
death. "It struck me that his grief had injured his understanding",
said Edgeworth, and he was becoming more and more uncomfortable, when
the door opened and a girl of fourteen or fifteen entering with a
tea-tray in her hand, suddenly changed the course of his host's
conversation. Indeed, she was beautiful; dressed in white; her nose a
shade too prominent, perhaps--but no, her proportions were
exquisitely right. "She is a scholar and an artist!" the clergyman
exclaimed as she left the room. But why did she leave the room? If
she was his daughter why did she not preside at the tea-table? Was
she his mistress? Who was she? And why was the house in this state of
litter and decay? Why was the front door locked? Why was the
clergyman apparently a prisoner, and what was his secret story?
Questions began to crowd into Edgeworth's head as he sat drinking his
tea; but he could only shake his head and make one last reflection,
"I feared that something was not right", as he shut the white wicket
gate behind him, and left alone for ever in the untidy house among
the planets and their satellites, the mad clergyman and the lovely
girl.

LAETITIA PILKINGTON

Let us bother the librarian once again. Let us ask him to reach
down, dust, and hand over to us that little brown book over there,
the Memoirs of Mrs. Pilkington, three volumes bound in one, printed
by Peter Hoey in Dublin, MDCCLXXVI. The deepest obscurity shades her
retreat; the dust lies heavy on her tomb--one board is loose, that is
to say, and nobody has read her since early in the last century when
a reader, presumably a lady, whether disgusted by her obscenity or
stricken by the hand of death, left off in the middle and marked her
place with a faded list of goods and groceries. If ever a woman
wanted a champion, it is obviously Laetitia Pilkington. Who then was
she?

Can you imagine a very extraordinary cross between Moll Flanders
and Lady Ritchie, between a rolling and rollicking woman of the town
and a lady of breeding and refinement? Laetitia Pilkington
(1712-1759) was something of the sort--shady, shifty, adventurous,
and yet, like Thackeray's daughter, like Miss Mitford, like Madame de
Sévigné and Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, so imbued
with the old traditions of her sex that she wrote, as ladies talk, to
give pleasure. Throughout her Memoirs, we can never forget
that it is her wish to entertain, her unhappy fate to sob. Dabbing
her eyes and controlling her anguish, she begs us to forgive an
odious breach of manners which only the suffering of a lifetime, the
intolerable persecutions of Mr. P----n, the malignant, she must say
the h----h, spite of Lady C----t can excuse. For who should know
better than the Earl of Killmallock's great-granddaughter that it is
the part of a lady to hide her sufferings? Thus Laetitia is in the
great tradition of English women of letters. It is her duty to
entertain; it is her instinct to conceal. Still, though her room near
the Royal Exchange is threadbare, and the table is spread with old
play-bills instead of a cloth, and the butter is served in a shoe,
and Mr. Worsdale has used the teapot to fetch small beer that very
morning, still she presides, still she entertains. Her language is a
trifle coarse, perhaps. But who taught her English? The great Doctor
Swift.

In all her wanderings, which were many, and in her failings, which
were great, she looked back to those early Irish days when Swift had
pinched her into propriety of speech. He had beaten her for fumbling
at a drawer: he had daubed her cheeks with burnt cork to try her
temper; he had bade her pull off her shoes and stockings and stand
against the wainscot and let him measure her. At first she had
refused; then she had yielded. "Why," said the Dean, "I suspected you
had either broken Stockings or foul toes, and in either case should
have delighted to expose you." Three feet two inches was all she
measured, he declared, though, as Laetitia complained, the weight of
Swift's hand on her head had made her shrink to half her size. But
she was foolish to complain. Probably she owed her intimacy to that
very fact--she was only three feet two. Swift had lived a lifetime
among the giants; now there was a charm in dwarfs. He took the little
creature into his library. "'Well,' said he, 'I have brought you here
to show you all the Money I got when I was in the Ministry, but don't
steal any of it.' 'I won't, indeed, Sir,' said I; so he opened a
Cabinet, and showed me a whole parcel of empty drawers. 'Bless me,'
says he, 'the Money is flown.'" There was a charm in her surprise;
there was a charm in her humility. He could beat her and bully her,
make her shout when he was deaf, force her husband to drink the lees
of the wine, pay their cab fares, stuff guineas into a piece of
gingerbread, and relent surprisingly, as if there were something
grimly pleasing to him in the thought of so foolish a midget setting
up to have a life and a mind of her own. For with Swift she was
herself; it was the effect of his genius. She had to pull off her
stockings if he told her to. So, though his satire terrified her, and
she found it highly unpleasant to dine at the Deanery and see him
watching, in the great glass which hung before him for that purpose,
the butler stealing beer at the sideboard, she knew that it was a
privilege to walk with him in his garden; to hear him talk of Mr.
Pope and quote Hudibras; and then be hustled back in the rain to save
coach hire, and then to sit chatting in the parlour with Mrs. Brent,
the housekeeper, about the Dean's oddity and charity, and how the
sixpence he saved on the coach he gave to the lame old man who sold
gingerbread at the corner, while the Dean dashed up the front stairs
and down the back so violently that she was afraid he would fall and
hurt himself.

But memories of great men are no infallible specific. They fall
upon the race of life like beams from a lighthouse. They flash, they
shock, they reveal, they vanish. To remember Swift was of little
avail to Laetitia when the troubles of life came thick about her. Mr.
Pilkington left her for Widow W--rr--n. Her father--her dear
father--died. The sheriff's officers insulted her. She was deserted
in an empty house with two children to provide for. The tea chest was
secured, the garden gate locked, and the bills left unpaid. And still
she was young and attractive and gay, with an inordinate passion for
scribbling verses and an incredible hunger for reading books. It was
this that was her undoing. The book was fascinating and the hour
late. The gentleman would not lend it, but would stay till she had
finished. They sat in her bedroom. It was highly indiscreet, she
owned. Suddenly twelve watchmen broke through the kitchen window, and
Mr. Pilkington appeared with a cambric handkerchief tied about his
neck. Swords were drawn and heads broken. As for her excuse, how
could one expect Mr. Pilkington and the twelve watchmen to believe
that? Only reading! Only sitting up late to finish a new book! Mr.
Pilkington and the watchmen interpreted the situation as such men
would. But lovers of learning, she is persuaded, will understand her
passion and deplore its consequences.

And now what was she to do? Reading had played her false, but
still she could write. Ever since she could form her letters, indeed,
she had written, with incredible speed and considerable grace, odes,
addresses, apostrophes to Miss Hoadley, to the Recorder of Dublin, to
Dr. Delville's place in the country. "Hail, happy Delville, blissful
seat!" "Is there a man whose fixed and steady gaze----"--the verses
flowed without the slightest difficulty on the slightest occasion.
Now, therefore, crossing to England, she set up, as her advertisement
had it, to write letters upon any subject, except the law, for twelve
pence ready money, and no trust given. She lodged opposite White's
Chocolate House, and there, in the evening, as she watered her
flowers on the leads, the noble gentlemen in the window across the
road drank her health, sent her over a bottle of burgundy; and later
she heard old Colonel ------ crying, "Poke after me, my lord, poke
after me," as he shepherded the D---- of M--lb--gh up her dark
stairs. That lovely gentleman, who honoured his title by wearing it,
kissed her, complimented her, opened his pocket-book, and left her
with a bank-note for fifty pounds upon Sir Francis Child. Such
tributes stimulated her pen to astonishing outbursts of impromptu
gratitude. If, on the other hand, a gentleman refused to buy or a
lady hinted impropriety, this same flowery pen writhed and twisted in
agonies of hate and vituperation. "Had I said that your F----r died
Blaspheming the Almighty", one of her accusations begins, but the end
is unprintable. Great ladies were accused of every depravity, and the
clergy, unless their taste in poetry was above reproach, suffered an
incessant castigation. Mr. Pilkington, she never forgot, was a
clergyman.

Slowly but surely the Earl of Killmallock's great-granddaughter
descended in the social scale. From St. James's Street and its noble
benefactors she migrated to Green Street to lodge with Lord Stair's
valet de chambre and his wife, who washed for persons of
distinction. She, who had dallied with dukes, was glad for company's
sake to take a hand at quadrille with footmen and laundresses and
Grub Street writers, who, as they drank porter, sipped green tea, and
smoked tobacco, told stories of the utmost scurrility about their
masters and mistresses. The spiciness of their conversation made
amends for the vulgarity of their manners. From them Laetitia picked
up those anecdotes of the great which sprinkled her pages with dashes
and served her purpose when subscribers failed and landladies grew
insolent. Indeed, it was a hard life--to trudge to Chelsea in the
snow wearing nothing but a chintz gown and be put off with a beggarly
half-crown by Sir Hans Sloane; next to tramp to Ormond Street and
extract two guineas from the odious Dr. Meade, which, in her glee,
she tossed in the air and lost in a crack of the floor; to be
insulted by footmen; to sit down to a dish of boiling water because
her landlady must not guess that a pinch of tea was beyond her means.
Twice on moonlight nights, with the lime trees in flower, she
wandered in St. James's Park and contemplated suicide in Rosamond's
Pond. Once, musing among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, the door was
locked on her, and she had to spend the night in the pulpit wrapped
in a carpet from the Communion Table to protect herself from the
assaults of rats. "I long to listen to the young-ey'd cherubims!" she
exclaimed. But a very different fate was in store for her. In spite
of Mr. Colley Cibber, and Mr. Richardson, who supplied her first with
gilt-edged notepaper and then with baby linen, those harpies, her
landladies, after drinking her ale, devouring her lobsters, and
failing often for years at a time to comb their hair, succeeded in
driving Swift's friend, and the Earl's great-granddaughter, to be
imprisoned with common debtors in the Marshalsea.

Bitterly she cursed her husband, who had made her a lady of
adventure instead of what nature intended, "a harmless household
dove". More and more wildly she ransacked her brains for anecdotes,
memories, scandals, views about the bottomless nature of the sea, the
inflammable character of the earth--anything that would fill a page
and earn her a guinea. She remembered that she had eaten plovers'
eggs with Swift. "Here, Hussey," said he, "is a Plover's egg. King
William used to give crowns apiece for them. . . ." Swift never
laughed, she remembered. He used to suck in his cheeks instead of
laughing. And what else could she remember? A great many gentlemen, a
great many landladies; how the window was thrown up when her father
died, and her sister came downstairs, with the sugar-basin, laughing.
All had been bitterness and struggle, except that she had loved
Shakespeare, known Swift, and kept through all the shifts and shades
of an adventurous career a gay spirit, something of a lady's
breeding, and the gallantry which, at the end of her short life, led
her to crack her joke and enjoy her duck with death at her heart and
duns at her pillow.

It is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had her way we
should have had nothing of Jane Austen's except her novels. To her
elder sister alone did she write freely; to her alone she confided
her hopes and, if rumour is true, the one great disappointment of her
life; but when Miss Cassandra Austen grew old, and the growth of her
sister's fame made her suspect that a time might come when strangers
would pry and scholars speculate, she burnt, at great cost to
herself, every letter that could gratify their curiosity, and spared
only what she judged too trivial to be of interest.

Hence our knowledge of Jane Austen is derived from a little
gossip, a few letters, and her books. As for the gossip, gossip which
has survived its day is never despicable; with a little rearrangement
it suits our purpose admirably. For example, Jane "is not at all
pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve . . . Jane is whimsical
and affected," says little Philadelphia Austen of her cousin. Then we
have Mrs. Mitford, who knew the Austens as girls and thought Jane
"the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she
ever remembers ". Next, there is Miss Mitford's anonymous friend "who
visits her now [and] says that she has stiffened into the most
perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of 'single blessedness' that
ever existed, and that, until Pride and Prejudice showed what
a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more
regarded in society than a poker or firescreen. . . . The case is
very different now", the good lady goes on; "she is still a
poker--but a poker of whom everybody is afraid. . . . A wit, a
delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!" On
the other side, of course, there are the Austens, a race little given
to panegyric of themselves, but nevertheless, they say, her brothers
"were very fond and very proud of her. They were attached to her by
her talents, her virtues, and her engaging manners, and each loved
afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his
own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet never
expected to see." Charming but perpendicular, loved at home but
feared by strangers, biting of tongue but tender of heart--these
contrasts are by no means incompatible, and when we turn to the
novels we shall find ourselves stumbling there too over the same
complexities in the writer.

To begin with, that prim little girl whom Philadelphia found so
unlike a child of twelve, whimsical and affected, was soon to be the
authoress of an astonishing and unchildish story, Love and
Freindship,1 which, incredible though it appears, was
written at the age of fifteen. It was written, apparently, to amuse
the schoolroom; one of the stories in the same book is dedicated with
mock solemnity to her brother; another is neatly illustrated with
water-colour heads by her sister. These are jokes which, one feels,
were family property; thrusts of satire, which went home because all
little Austens made mock in common of fine ladies who "sighed and
fainted on the sofa".

1Love and Freindship, Chatto and Windus.

Brothers and sisters must have laughed when Jane read out loud her
last hit at the vices which they all abhorred. "I die a martyr to my
grief for the loss of Augustus. One fatal swoon has cost me my life.
Beware of Swoons, Dear Laura. . . . Run mad as often as you chuse,
but do not faint. . . ." And on she rushed, as fast as she could
write and quicker than she could spell, to tell the incredible
adventures of Laura and Sophia, of Philander and Gustavus, of the
gentleman who drove a coach between Edinburgh and Stirling every
other day, of the theft of the fortune that was kept in the table
drawer, of the starving mothers and the sons who acted Macbeth.
Undoubtedly, the story must have roused the schoolroom to uproarious
laughter. And yet, nothing is more obvious than that this girl of
fifteen, sitting in her private corner of the common parlour, was
writing not to draw a laugh from brother and sisters, and not for
home consumption. She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our
age, for her own; in other words, even at that early age Jane Austen
was writing. One hears it in the rhythm and shapeliness and severity
of the sentences. "She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered,
civil, and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike
her--she was only an object of contempt." Such a sentence is meant to
outlast the Christmas holidays. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging
with freedom upon sheer nonsense,--Love and Freindship is all
that; but what is this note which never merges in the rest, which
sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the
sound of laughter. The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at
the world.

Girls of fifteen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr. Binney
helps himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing
when old Mrs. Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the
moment after. They have no fixed abode from which they see that there
is something eternally laughable in human nature, some quality in men
and women that for ever excites our satire. They do not know that
Lady Greville who snubs, and poor Maria who is snubbed, are permanent
features of every ballroom. But Jane Austen knew it from her birth
upwards. One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken
her a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was
laid in the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked
like, but had already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she
might rule over that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at
fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about
herself. Whatever she writes is finished and turned and set in its
relation, not to the parsonage, but to the universe. She is
impersonal; she is inscrutable. When the writer, Jane Austen, wrote
down in the most remarkable sketch in the book a little of Lady
Greville's conversation, there is no trace of anger at the snub which
the clergyman's daughter, Jane Austen, once received. Her gaze passes
straight to the mark, and we know precisely where, upon the map of
human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane Austen kept to her
compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even at
the emotional age of fifteen, did she round upon herself in shame,
obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an outline in
a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said,
pointing with her stick, end there; and the boundary line is
perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains
and castles exist--on the other side. She has even one romance of her
own. It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much.
"One of the first characters in the world", she called her, "a
bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk,
and whose only ones now Mr. Whitaker, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and
myself." With these words her passion is neatly circumscribed, and
rounded with a laugh. It is amusing to remember in what terms the
young Brontë's wrote, not very much later, in their northern
parsonage, about the Duke of Wellington.

The prim little girl grew up. She became "the prettiest, silliest,
most affected husband-hunting butterfly" Mrs. Mitford ever
remembered, and, incidentally, the authoress of a novel called
Pride and Prejudice, which, written stealthily under cover of
a creaking door, lay for many years unpublished. A little later, it
is thought, she began another story, The Watsons, and being
for some reason dissatisfied with it, left it unfinished. The
second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they
offer the best criticism of his masterpieces. Here her difficulties
are more apparent, and the method she took to overcome them less
artfully concealed. To begin with, the stiffness and the bareness of
the first chapters prove that she was one of those writers who lay
their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back
and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere. How it
would have been done we cannot say--by what suppressions and
insertions and artful devices. But the miracle would have been
accomplished; the dull history of fourteen years of family life would
have been converted into another of those exquisite and apparently
effortless introductions; and we should never have guessed what pages
of preliminary drudgery Jane Austen forced her pen to go through.
Here we perceive that she was no conjuror after all. Like other
writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her own peculiar
genius could bear fruit. Here she fumbles; here she keeps us waiting.
Suddenly she has done it; now things can happen as she likes things
to happen. The Edwardses are going to the ball. The Tomlinsons'
carriage is passing; she can tell us that Charles is "being provided
with his gloves and told to keep them on"; Tom Musgrave retreats to a
remote corner with a barrel of oysters and is famously snug. Her
genius is freed and active. At once our senses quicken; we are
possessed with the peculiar intensity which she alone can impart. But
of what is it all composed? Of a ball in a country town; a few
couples meeting and taking hands in an assembly room; a little eating
and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy being snubbed by one young
lady and kindly treated by another. There is no tragedy and no
heroism. Yet for some reason the little scene is moving out of all
proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been made to see that if
Emma acted so in the ball-room, how considerate, how tender, inspired
by what sincerity of feeling she would have shown herself in those
graver crises of life which, as we watch her, come inevitably before
our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than
appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not
there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of
something that expands in the reader's mind and endows with the most
enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the
stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder, will Emma
behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrave make their call at five
minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the
knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are
accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself
ill-bred, vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue
keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon
the present moment, half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma
behaves in such a way as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we
are moved as if we had been made witnesses of a matter of the highest
importance. Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior
story, are all the elements of Jane Austen's greatness. It has the
permanent quality of literature. Think away the surface animation,
the likeness to life, and there remains, to provide a deeper
pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of human values. Dismiss this
too from the mind and one can dwell with extreme satisfaction upon
the more abstract art which, in the ball-room scene, so varies the
emotions and proportions the parts that it is possible to enjoy it,
as one enjoys poetry, for itself, and not as a link which carries the
story this way and that.

But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular,
precise, and taciturn--"a poker of whom everybody is afraid". Of this
too there are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of
the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature. Those first
angular chapters of The Watsons prove that hers was not a
prolific genius; she had not, like Emily Brontë, merely to open
the door to make herself felt. Humbly and gaily she collected the
twigs and straws out of which the nest was to be made and placed them
neatly together. The twigs and straws were a little dry and a little
dusty in themselves. There was the big house and the little house; a
tea party, a dinner party, and an occasional picnic; life was hedged
in by valuable connections and adequate incomes; by muddy roads, wet
feet, and a tendency on the part of the ladies to get tired; a little
principle supported it, a little consequence, and the education
commonly enjoyed by upper middle-class families living in the
country. Vice, adventure, passion were left outside. But of all this
prosiness, of all this littleness, she evades nothing, and nothing is
slurred over. Patiently and precisely she tells us how they "made no
stop anywhere till they reached Newbury, where a comfortable meal,
uniting dinner and supper, wound up the enjoyments and fatigues of
the day". Nor does she pay to conventions merely the tribute of lip
homage; she believes in them besides accepting them. When she is
describing a clergyman, like Edmund Bertram, or a sailor, in
particular, she appears debarred by the sanctity of his office from
the free use of her chief tool, the comic genius, and is apt
therefore to lapse into decorous panegyric or matter-of-fact
description. But these are exceptions; for the most part her attitude
recalls the anonymous lady's ejaculation--"A wit, a delineator of
character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!" She wishes neither
to reform nor to annihilate; she is silent; and that is terrific
indeed. One after another she creates her fools, her prigs, her
worldlings, her Mr. Collinses, her Sir Walter Elliotts, her Mrs.
Bennets. She encircles them with the lash of a whip-like phrase
which, as it runs round them, cuts out their silhouettes for ever.
But there they remain; no excuse is found for them and no mercy shown
them. Nothing remains of Julia and Maria Bertram when she has done
with them; Lady Bertram is left "sitting and calling to Pug and
trying to keep him from the flower-beds" eternally. A divine justice
is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins by liking his goose tender, ends
by bringing on "apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary
dinners in one week". Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were
born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their
heads off. She is satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a
hair on anybody's head, or move one brick or one blade of grass in a
world which provides her with such exquisite delight.

Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity,
or the heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full
of spite, pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People
are like that--the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature woman proves
it. At this very moment some Lady Bertram is trying to keep Pug from
the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny a little late.
The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just, that,
consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of
pettiness, no hint of spite, rouse us from our contemplation. Delight
strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these
fools.

That elusive quality is, indeed, often made up of very different
parts, which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of
Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is
a fool, her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of
sanity and sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us
unmistakably even while she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist
make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against
the disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost
stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness,
truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in
English literature. She depicts a Mary Crawford in her mixture of
good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against
the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year,
with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again she strikes
one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once
all Mary Crawford's chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings
flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From
such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even, which are not
only as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. In
The Watsons she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes
us wonder why an ordinary act of kindness, as she describes it,
becomes so full of meaning. In her masterpieces, the same gift is
brought to perfection. Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday
in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly
young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with
housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace, their
words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of
the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it
glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second;
next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all the happiness
of life has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the
ebb and flow of ordinary existence.

What more natural, then, with this insight into their profundity,
than that Jane Austen should have chosen to write of the trivialities
of day-to-day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances? No
"suggestions to alter her style of writing" from the Prince Regent or
Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no adventure, no politics or
intrigue could hold a candle to life on a country-house staircase as
she saw it. Indeed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their
heads against a very formidable obstacle; they were trying to tamper
with an incorruptible conscience, to disturb an infallible
discretion. The child who formed her sentences so finely when she was
fifteen never ceased to form them, and never wrote for the Prince
Regent or his Librarian, but for the world at large. She knew exactly
what her powers were, and what material they were fitted to deal with
as material should be dealt with by a writer whose standard of
finality was high. There were impressions that lay outside her
province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice could be properly
coated and covered by her own resources. For example, she could not
make a girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels. She could
not throw herself whole-heartedly into a romantic moment. She had all
sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its
beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a
beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we
read the few formal phrases about "the brilliancy of an unclouded
night and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods", the night is
at once as "solemn, and soothing, and lovely" as she tells us, quite
simply, that it was.

The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect. Among her
finished novels there are no failures, and among her many chapters
few that sink markedly below the level of the others. But, after all,
she died at the age of forty-two. She died at the height of her
powers. She was still subject to those changes which often make the
final period of a writer's career the most interesting of all.
Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted with an invention of great vitality,
there can be no doubt that she would have written more, had she
lived, and it is tempting to consider whether she would not have
written differently. The boundaries were marked; moons, mountains,
and castles lay on the other side. But was she not sometimes tempted
to trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning, in her own gay and
brilliant manner, to contemplate a little voyage of discovery?

Let us take Persuasion, the last completed novel, and look
by its light at the books she might have written had she lived. There
is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion.
The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage
between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has
grown too familiar with the ways of her world; she no longer notes
them freshly. There is an asperity in her comedy which suggests that
she has almost ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or
the snobbery of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy
crude. She is no longer so freshly aware of the amusements of daily
life. Her mind is not altogether on her object. But, while we feel
that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also
feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet
attempted. There is a new element in Persuasion, the quality,
perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and insist that it was "the
most beautiful of her works". She is beginning to discover that the
world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had
supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of Anne:
"She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance
as she grew older--the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning". She
dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of nature, upon
the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the spring. She
talks of the "influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal months in the
country". She marks "the tawny leaves and withered hedges". "One does
not love a place the less because one has suffered in it", she
observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature that we
detect the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She is
seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a
woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness
and unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced
to comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of
facts and more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed
emotion in the scene at the concert and in the famous talk about
woman's constancy which proves not merely the biographical fact that
Jane Austen had loved, but the aesthetic fact that she was no longer
afraid to say so. Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to
sink very deep, and to be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of
time, before she allowed herself to deal with it in fiction. But now,
in 1817, she was ready. Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a
change was imminent. Her fame had grown very slowly. "I doubt ",
wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, "whether it would be possible to mention any
other author of note whose personal obscurity was so complete." Had
she lived a few more years only, all that would have been altered.
She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous
people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the
quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at
leisure.

And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that
Jane Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of
passion, or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the
importunity of publishers or the flattery of friends into
slovenliness or insincerity. But she would have known more. Her sense
of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered.
She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in
Persuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a
knowledge of her characters. Those marvellous little speeches which
sum up, in a few minutes' chatter, all that we need in order to know
an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove for ever, that shorthand,
hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and
psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now
perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a
method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive,
for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid;
not only what they are, but what life is. She would have stood
farther away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less
as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would
have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the
forerunner of Henry James and of Proust--but enough. Vain are these
speculations: the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose
books are immortal, died "just as she was beginning to feel
confidence in her own success".

In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern
fiction, it is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern
practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With
their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said,
Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better, but compare their
opportunities with ours! Their masterpieces certainly have a strange
air of simplicity. And yet the analogy between literature and the
process, to choose an example, of making motor cars scarcely holds
good beyond the first glance. It is doubtful whether in the course of
the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we
have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write
better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little
in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should
the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty
pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand,
even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat, in the
crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier
warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene
an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering
that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the
historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now
beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of
prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know
that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain
paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the
desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some
account.

Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of
quarrelling with Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy, it is
partly that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh their
work has a living, breathing, everyday imperfection which bids us
take what liberties with it we choose. But it is also true that,
while we thank them for a thousand gifts, we reserve our
unconditional gratitude for Mr. Hardy, for Mr. Conrad, and in a much
lesser degree for the Mr. Hudson of The Purple Land, Green
Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago. Mr. Wells, Mr.
Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and
disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes
the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have
done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as
certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up
the charge or grievance which we have to bring against a mass of work
so large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both
admirable and the reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in
one word we should say that these three writers are materialists. It
is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body
that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the
sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may
be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul.
Naturally, no single word reaches the centre of three separate
targets. In the case of Mr. Wells it falls notably wide of the mark.
And yet even with him it indicates to our thinking the fatal alloy in
his genius, the great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up with
the purity of his inspiration. But Mr. Bennett is perhaps the worst
culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by far the best workman. He
can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship
that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through
what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There is not so much as a
draught between the frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards.
And yet--if life should refuse to live there? That is a risk which
the creator of The Old Wives' Tale, George Cannon, Edwin
Clayhanger, and hosts of other figures, may well claim to have
surmounted. His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it
remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for? More and
more they seem to us, deserting even the well-built villa in the Five
Towns, to spend their time in some softly padded first-class railway
carriage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and the destiny to
which they travel so luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably
an eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton. It can
scarcely be said of Mr. Wells that he is a materialist in the sense
that he takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric. His
mind is too generous in its sympathies to allow him to spend much
time in making things shipshape and substantial. He is a materialist
from sheer goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulders the work that
ought to have been discharged by Government officials, and in the
plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise,
or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his
human beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of
his earth and of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here
and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority
of their natures tarnish whatever institutions and ideals may be
provided for them by the generosity of their creator? Nor, profoundly
though we respect the integrity and humanity of Mr. Galsworthy, shall
we find what we seek in his pages.

If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one
word materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant
things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the
trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find
it difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that
we exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But
it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the
crest of a sigh--Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can
it be that, owing to one of those little deviations which the human
spirit seems to make from time to time, Mr. Bennett has come down
with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two
on the wrong side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing
else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make
use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by
speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the
vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the
opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue
more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it
life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has
moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such
ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on
perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty
chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the
vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the
solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour
thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and
blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems
constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and
unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to
provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability
embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to
come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last
button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is
obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more
often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of
rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life
like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being "like
this". Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The
mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent,
or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they
shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he
could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his
work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no
plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond
Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps
symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the
end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this
unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity
it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as
possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we
are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other
than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to
define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young
writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable, from that of
their predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to
preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them,
even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are
commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they
fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the
pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which
each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take
it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly
thought big than in what is commonly thought small. Any one who has
read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or, what
promises to be a far more interesting work,
Ulysses,1 now appearing in the Little
Review, will have hazarded some theory of this nature as to Mr.
Joyce's intention. On our part, with such a fragment before us, it is
hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the intention of the
whole, there can be no question but that it is of the utmost
sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may
judge it, is undeniably important. In contrast with those whom we
have called materialists, Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at
all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which
flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it
he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him
adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other
of these signposts which for generations have served to support the
imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can
neither touch nor see. The scene in the cemetery, for instance, with
its brilliancy, its sordidity, its incoherence, its sudden lightning
flashes of significance, does undoubtedly come so close to the quick
of the mind that, on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not
to acclaim a masterpiece. If we want life itself, here surely we have
it. Indeed, we find ourselves fumbling rather awkwardly if we try to
say what else we wish, and for what reason a work of such originality
yet fails to compare, for we must take high examples, with
Youth or The Mayor of Casterbridge. It fails because of
the comparative poverty of the writer's mind, we might say simply and
have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and
wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet
narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free,
to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind. Is
it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to the
method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a
self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces
or creates what is outside itself and beyond? Does the emphasis laid,
perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of
something angular and isolated? Or is it merely that in any effort of
such originality it is much easier, for contemporaries especially, to
feel what it lacks than to name what it gives? In any case it is a
mistake to stand outside examining "methods". Any method is right,
every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we
are writers; that brings us closer to the novelist's intention if we
are readers. This method has the merit of bringing us closer to what
we were prepared to call life itself; did not the reading of
Ulysses suggest how much of life is excluded or ignored, and
did it not come with a shock to open Tristram Shandy or even
Pendennis and be by them convinced that there are not only
other aspects of life, but more important ones into the bargain.

1 Written April 1919.

However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present,
as we suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of
being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to
say that what interests him is no longer "this" but "that": out of
"that" alone must he construct his work. For the moderns "that", the
point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology.
At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the
emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at once a different
outline of form becomes necessary, difficult for us to grasp,
incomprehensible to our predecessors. No one but a modern, no one
perhaps but a Russian, would have felt the interest of the situation
which Tchekov has made into the short story which he calls "Gusev".
Some Russian soldiers lie ill on board a ship which is taking them
back to Russia. We are given a few scraps of their talk and some of
their thoughts; then one of them dies and is carried away; the talk
goes on among the others for a time, until Gusev himself dies, and
looking "like a carrot or a radish" is thrown overboard. The emphasis
is laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if
there were no emphasis at all; and then, as the eyes accustom
themselves to twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room we
see how complete the story is, how profound, and how truly in
obedience to his vision Tchekov has chosen this, that, and the other,
and placed them together to compose something new. But it is
impossible to say "this is comic", or "that is tragic", nor are we
certain, since short stories, we have been taught, should be brief
and conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should
be called a short story at all.

The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly
avoid some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are
mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction
save theirs is waste of time. If we want understanding of the soul
and heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we
are sick of our own materialism the least considerable of their
novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human
spirit. "Learn to make yourself akin to people. . . . But let this
sympathy be not with the mind--for it is easy with the mind--but with
the heart, with love towards them." In every great Russian writer we
seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the
sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal
worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute
saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a
feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our
famous novels to tinsel and trickery. The conclusions of the Russian
mind, thus comprehensive and compassionate, are inevitably, perhaps,
of the utmost sadness. More accurately indeed we might speak of the
inconclusiveness of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is
no answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after
question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is
over in hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally
it may be with a resentful, despair. They are right perhaps;
unquestionably they see further than we do and without our gross
impediments of vision. But perhaps we see something that escapes
them, or why should this voice of protest mix itself with our gloom?
The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient
civilisation which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and
fight rather than to suffer and understand. English fiction from
Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in humour and
comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities of the intellect,
and in the splendour of the body. But any deductions that we may draw
from the comparison of two fictions so immeasurably far apart are
futile save indeed as they flood us with a view of the infinite
possibilities of the art and remind us that there is no limit to the
horizon, and that nothing--no "method", no experiment, even of the
wildest--is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. "The proper
stuff of fiction" does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of
fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and
spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can
imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she
would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour
and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty
assured.

Of the hundred years that have passed since Charlotte Brontë
was born, she, the centre now of so much legend, devotion, and
literature, lived but thirty-nine. It is strange to reflect how
different those legends might have been had her life reached the
ordinary human span. She might have become, like some of her famous
contemporaries, a figure familiarly met with in London and elsewhere,
the subject of pictures and anecdotes innumerable, the writer of many
novels, of memoirs possibly, removed from us well within the memory
of the middle-aged in all the splendour of established fame. She
might have been wealthy, she might have been prosperous. But it is
not so. When we think of her we have to imagine some one who had no
lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds back to the
'fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the wild
Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and
lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.

1 Written in 1916.

These circumstances, as they affected her character, may have left
their traces on her work. A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build
up his structure with much very perishable material which begins by
lending it reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open
Jane Eyre once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we
shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and
out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited
by the curious, only preserved by the pious. So we open Jane
Eyre; and in two pages every doubt is swept clean from our
minds.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the
left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me
from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the
leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.
Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet
lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly
before a long and lamentable blast.

There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or
more subject to the sway of fashion than the "long and lamentable
blast". Nor is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through
the entire volume, without giving us time to think, without letting
us lift our eyes from the page. So intense is our absorption that if
some one moves in the room the movement seems to take place not there
but up in Yorkshire. The writer has us by the hand, forces us along
her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or
allows us to forget her. At the end we are steeped through and
through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte
Brontë. Remarkable faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled
feature have flashed upon us in passing; but it is through her eyes
that we have seen them. Once she is gone, we seek for them in vain.
Think of Rochester and we have to think of Jane Eyre. Think of the
moor, and again there is Jane Eyre. Think of the
drawing-room,1 even, those "white carpets on which seemed
laid brilliant garlands of flowers", that "pale Parian mantelpiece"
with its Bohemia glass of "ruby red" and the "general blending of
snow and fire"--what is all that except Jane Eyre?

1 Charlotte and Emily Brontë had much the same
sense of colour. ". . . we saw--ah! it was beautiful--a splendid
place carpeted with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables,
and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass drops
hanging in silver chains from the centre, and shimmering with little
soft tapers" (Wuthering Heights). "Yet it was merely a very
pretty drawing-room, and within it a boudoir, both spread with white
carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both
ceiled with snowy mouldings of white grapes and vine leaves, beneath
which glowed in rich contrast crimson couches and ottomans; while the
ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia
glass, ruby red; and between the windows large mirrors repeated the
general blending of snow and fire" (Jane Eyre).

The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be
a governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a
world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the
other. The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have a million
facets compared with these. They live and are complex by means of
their effect upon many different people who serve to mirror them in
the round. They move hither and thither whether their creators watch
them or not, and the world in which they live seems to us an
independent world which we can visit, now that they have created it,
by ourselves. Thomas Hardy is more akin to Charlotte Brontë in
the power of his personality and the narrowness of his vision. But
the differences are vast. As we read Jude the Obscure we are
not rushed to a finish; we brood and ponder and drift away from the
text in plethoric trains of thought which build up round the
characters an atmosphere of question and suggestion of which they are
themselves, as often as not, unconscious. Simple peasants as they
are, we are forced to confront them with destinies and questionings
of the hugest import, so that often it seems as if the most important
characters in a Hardy novel are those which have no names. Of this
power, of this speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no
trace. She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she
is even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is
the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion,
"I love", "I hate", "I suffer".

For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied
the more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close
packed and strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing
issues from their minds which has not been marked with their own
impress. They learn little from other writers, and what they adopt
they cannot assimilate. Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear
to have founded their styles upon a stiff and decorous journalism.
The staple of their prose is awkward and unyielding. But both with
labour and the most obstinate integrity, by thinking every thought
until it has subdued words to itself, have forged for themselves a
prose which takes the mould of their minds entire; which has, into
the bargain, a beauty, a power, a swiftness of its own. Charlotte
Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the reading of many books. She
never learnt the smoothness of the professional writer, or acquired
his ability to stuff and sway his language as he chooses. "I could
never rest in communication with strong, discreet, and refined minds,
whether male or female", she writes, as any leader-writer in a
provincial journal might have written; but gathering fire and speed
goes on in her own authentic voice "till I had passed the outworks of
conventional reserve and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won
a place by their hearts' very hearthstone". It is there that she
takes her seat; it is the red and fitful glow of the heart's fire
which illumines her page. In other words, we read Charlotte
Brontë not for exquisite observation of character--her
characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy--hers is grim
and crude; not for a philosophic view of life--hers is that of a
country parson's daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so
with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality,
so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to
make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity
perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them
desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This
very ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings
its way past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself
with their more inarticulate passions. It makes them poets, or, if
they choose to write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence
it is that both Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of
nature. They both feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the
vast and slumbering passions in human nature than words or actions
can convey. It is with a description of a storm that Charlotte ends
her finest novel Villette. "The skies hang full and dark--a
wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange
forms." So she calls in nature to describe a state of mind which
could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of the sisters observed
nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed it, or painted it
minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those aspects of the
earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to
their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely
spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull
page or display the writer's powers of observation--they carry on the
emotion and light up the meaning of the book.

The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens
and what is said and consists rather in some connection which things
in themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard
to grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the
writer is poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and
itself rather a mood than a particular observation. Wuthering
Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane
Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When
Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion "I
love", "I hate", "I suffer". Her experience, though more intense, is
on a level with our own. But there is no "I" in Wuthering
Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There
is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired
by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to
create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out
upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the
power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt
throughout the novel--a struggle, half thwarted but of superb
conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters
which is not merely "I love" or "I hate", but "we, the whole human
race" and "you, the eternal powers . . ." the sentence remains
unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so; rather it is
astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in her to say
at all. It surges up in the half-articulate words of Catherine
Earnshaw, "If all else perished and he remained, I should
still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were
annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should
not seem part of it". It breaks out again in the presence of the
dead. "I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I
feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the
eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration,
and love in its sympathy and joy in its fulness." It is this
suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and
lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book
its huge stature among other novels. But it was not enough for Emily
Brontë to write a few lyrics, to utter a cry, to express a
creed. In her poems she did this once and for all, and her poems will
perhaps outlast her novel. But she was novelist as well as poet. She
must take upon herself a more laborious and a more ungrateful task.
She must face the fact of other existences, grapple with the
mechanism of external things, build up, in recognisable shape, farms
and houses and report the speeches of men and women who existed
independently of herself. And so we reach these summits of emotion
not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to
herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching the moor
sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind breathing through
the grass. The life at the farm with all its absurdities and its
improbability is laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of
comparing Wuthering Heights with a real farm and Heathcliff
with a real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or
insight or the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so little
resemble what we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in
Heathcliff the brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is
impossible we say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has a more
vivid existence than his. So it is with the two Catherines; never
could women feel as they do or act in their manner, we say. All the
same, they are the most lovable women in English fiction. It is as if
she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these
unrecognisable transparences with such a gust of life that they
transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could
free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate
the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the
moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.

To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one
knows about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not
very creditable to one's insight, with which, half consciously and
partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a
deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded
than herself. At what moment and by what means her spell was broken
it is difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the
publication of her Life. Perhaps George Meredith, with his
phrase about the "mercurial little showman" and the "errant woman" on
the daïs, gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands
incapable of aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly. She
became one of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol
of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry
and could be dismissed with the same scorn. Lord Acton had said that
she was greater than Dante; Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as
if they were not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London
Library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex. Moreover, her
private record was not more alluring than her public. Asked to
describe an afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller always
intimated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had come
to tickle his sense of humour. He had been so much alarmed by the
grave lady in her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the
intelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a
note in the fine clear hand of the great novelist bore witness. It
was dated on the Monday morning, and she accused herself of having
spoken without due forethought of Marivaux when she meant another;
but no doubt, she said, her listener had already supplied the
correction. Still, the memory of talking about Marivaux to George
Eliot on a Sunday afternoon was not a romantic memory. It had faded
with the passage of the years. It had not become picturesque.

Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that the long, heavy face
with its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has
stamped itself depressingly upon the minds of people who remember
George Eliot, so that it looks out upon them from her pages. Mr.
Gosse has lately described her as he saw her driving through London
in a victoria:

a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive
features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously
bordered by a hat, always in the height of Paris fashion, which in
those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather.

Lady Ritchie, with equal skill, has left a more intimate indoor
portrait:

She sat by the fire in a beautiful black satin gown, with a green
shaded lamp on the table beside her, where I saw German books lying
and pamphlets and ivory paper-cutters. She was very quiet and noble,
with two steady little eyes and a sweet voice. As I looked I felt her
to be a friend, not exactly a personal friend, but a good and
benevolent impulse.

A scrap of her talk is preserved. "We ought to respect our
influence," she said. "We know by our own experience how very much
others affect our lives, and we must remember that we in turn must
have the same effect upon others." Jealously treasured, committed to
memory, one can imagine recalling the scene, repeating the words,
thirty years later and suddenly, for the first time, bursting into
laughter.

In all these records one feels that the recorder, even when he was
in the actual presence, kept his distance and kept his head, and
never read the novels in later years with the light of a vivid, or
puzzling, or beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In fiction,
where so much of personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a
great lack; and her critics, who have been, of course, mostly of the
opposite sex, have resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency
in a quality which is held to be supremely desirable in women. George
Eliot was not charming; she was not strongly feminine; she had none
of those eccentricities and inequalities of temper which give to so
many artists the endearing simplicity of children. One feels that to
most people, as to Lady Ritchie, she was "not exactly a personal
friend, but a good and benevolent impulse". But if we consider these
portraits more closely we shall find that they are all the portraits
of an elderly celebrated woman, dressed in black satin, driving in
her victoria, a woman who has been through her struggle and issued
from it with a profound desire to be of use to others, but with no
wish for intimacy, save with the little circle who had known her in
the days of her youth. We know very little about the days of her
youth; but we do know that the culture, the philosophy, the fame, and
the influence were all built upon a very humble foundation--she was
the grand-daughter of a carpenter.

The first volume of her life is a singularly depressing record. In
it we see her raising herself with groans and struggles from the
intolerable boredom of petty provincial society (her father had risen
in the world and become more middle class, but less picturesque) to
be the assistant editor of a highly intellectual London review, and
the esteemed companion of Herbert Spencer. The stages are painful as
she reveals them in the sad soliloquy in which Mr. Cross condemned
her to tell the story of her life. Marked in early youth as one "sure
to get something up very soon in the way of a clothing club", she
proceeded to raise funds for restoring a church by making a chart of
ecclesiastical history; and that was followed by a loss of faith
which so disturbed her father that he refused to live with her. Next
came the struggle with the translation of Strauss, which, dismal and
"soul-stupefying" in itself, can scarcely have been made less so by
the usual feminine tasks of ordering a household and nursing a dying
father, and the distressing conviction, to one so dependent upon
affection, that by becoming a blue-stocking she was forfeiting her
brother's respect. "I used to go about like an owl," she said, "to
the great disgust of my brother." "Poor thing," wrote a friend who
saw her toiling through Strauss with a statue of the risen Christ in
front of her, "I do pity her sometimes, with her pale sickly face and
dreadful headaches, and anxiety, too, about her father." Yet, though
we cannot read the story without a strong desire that the stages of
her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more
beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon the
citadel of culture which raises it above our pity. Her development
was very slow and very awkward, but it had the irresistible impetus
behind it of a deep-seated and noble ambition. Every obstacle at
length was thrust from her path. She knew every one. She read
everything. Her astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed.
Youth was over, but youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the
age of thirty-five, at the height of her powers, and in the fulness
of her freedom, she made the decision which was of such profound
moment to her and still matters even to us, and went to Weimar, alone
with George Henry Lewes.

The books which followed so soon after her union testify in the
fullest manner to the great liberation which had come to her with
personal happiness. In themselves they provide us with a plentiful
feast. Yet at the threshold of her literary career one may find in
some of the circumstances of her life influences that turned her mind
to the past, to the country village, to the quiet and beauty and
simplicity of childish memories and away from herself and the
present. We understand how it was that her first book was Scenes
of Clerical Life, and not Middlemarch. Her union with
Lewes had surrounded her with affection, but in view of the
circumstances and of the conventions it had also isolated her. "I
wish it to be understood", she wrote in 1857, "that I should never
invite any one to come and see me who did not ask for the
invitation." She had been "cut off from what is called the world",
she said later, but she did not regret it. By becoming thus marked,
first by circumstances and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost
the power to move on equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss
for a novelist was serious. Still, basking in the light and sunshine
of Scenes of Clerical Life, feeling the large mature mind
spreading itself with a luxurious sense of freedom in the world of
her "remotest past", to speak of loss seems inappropriate. Everything
to such a mind was gain. All experience filtered down through layer
after layer of perception and reflection, enriching and nourishing.
The utmost we can say, in qualifying her attitude towards fiction by
what little we know of her life, is that she had taken to heart
certain lessons not usually learnt early, if learnt at all, among
which, perhaps, the most branded upon her was the melancholy virtue
of tolerance; her sympathies are with the everyday lot, and play most
happily in dwelling upon the homespun of ordinary joys and sorrows.
She has none of that romantic intensity which is connected with a
sense of one's own individuality, unsated and unsubdued, cutting its
shape sharply upon the background of the world. What were the loves
and sorrows of a snuffy old clergyman, dreaming over his whisky, to
the fiery egotism of Jane Eyre? The beauty of those first books,
Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, is
very great. It is impossible to estimate the merit of the Poysers,
the Dodsons, the Gilfils, the Bartons, and the rest with all their
surroundings and dependencies, because they have put on flesh and
blood and we move among them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always
with that unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do, which
we accord to the great originals only. The flood of memory and humour
which she pours so spontaneously into one figure, one scene after
another, until the whole fabric of ancient rural England is revived,
has so much in common with a natural process that it leaves us with
little consciousness that there is anything to criticise. We accept;
we feel the delicious warmth and release of spirit which the great
creative writers alone procure for us. As one comes back to the books
after years of absence they pour out, even against our expectation,
the same store of energy and heat, so that we want more than anything
to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating down from the red orchard
wall. If there is an element of unthinking abandonment in thus
submitting to the humours of Midland farmers and their wives, that,
too, is right in the circumstances. We scarcely wish to analyse what
we feel to be so large and deeply human. And when we consider how
distant in time the world of Shepperton and Hayslope is, and how
remote the minds of farmer and agricultural labourers from those of
most of George Eliot's readers, we can only attribute the ease and
pleasure with which we ramble from house to smithy, from cottage
parlour to rectory garden, to the fact that George Eliot makes us
share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity,
but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist. The movement of her
mind was too slow and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy. But she
gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of
human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant and
wholesome understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not
only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an
unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears. There is the famous Mrs.
Poyser. It would have been easy to work her idiosyncrasies to death,
and, as it is, perhaps, George Eliot gets her laugh in the same place
a little too often. But memory, after the book is shut, brings out,
as sometimes in real life, the details and subtleties which some more
salient characteristic has prevented us from noticing at the time. We
recollect that her health was not good. There were occasions upon
which she said nothing at all. She was patience itself with a sick
child. She doted upon Totty. Thus one can muse and speculate about
the greater number of George Eliot's characters and find, even in the
least important, a roominess and margin where those qualities lurk
which she has no call to bring from their obscurity.

But in the midst of all this tolerance and sympathy there are,
even in the early books, moments of greater stress. Her humour has
shown itself broad enough to cover a wide range of fools and
failures, mothers and children, dogs and flourishing midland fields,
farmers, sagacious or fuddled over their ale, horse-dealers,
inn-keepers, curates, and carpenters. Over them all broods a certain
romance, the only romance that George Eliot allowed herself--the
romance of the past. The books are astonishingly readable and have no
trace of pomposity or pretence. But to the reader who holds a large
stretch of her early work in view it will become obvious that the
mist of recollection gradually withdraws. It is not that her power
diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its
imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up
people. But the world of fields and farms no longer contents her. In
real life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look
back into the past was calming and consoling, there are, even in the
early works, traces of that troubled spirit, that exacting and
questioning and baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. In
Adam Bede there is a hint of her in Dinah. She shows herself
far more openly and completely in Maggie in The Mill on the
Floss. She is Janet in Janet's Repentance, and Romola, and
Dorothea seeking wisdom and finding one scarcely knows what in
marriage with Ladislaw. Those who fall foul of George Eliot do so, we
incline to think, on account of her heroines; and with good reason;
for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of her, lead her
into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic, and
occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could delete the whole sisterhood you
would leave a much smaller and a much inferior world, albeit a world
of greater artistic perfection and far superior jollity and comfort.
In accounting for her failure, in so far as it was a failure, one
recollects that she never wrote a story until she was thirty-seven,
and that by the time she was thirty-seven she had come to think of
herself with a mixture of pain and something like resentment. For
long she preferred not to think of herself at all. Then, when the
first flush of creative energy was exhausted and self-confidence had
come to her, she wrote more and more from the personal standpoint,
but she did so without the unhesitating abandonment of the young. Her
self-consciousness is always marked when her heroines say what she
herself would have said. She disguised them in every possible way.
She granted them beauty and wealth into the bargain; she invented,
more improbably, a taste for brandy. But the disconcerting and
stimulating fact remained that she was compelled by the very power of
her genius to step forth in person upon the quiet bucolic scene.

The noble and beautiful girl who insisted upon being born into the
Mill on the Floss is the most obvious example of the ruin which a
heroine can strew about her. Humour controls her and keeps her
lovable so long as she is small and can be satisfied by eloping with
the gipsies or hammering nails into her doll; but she develops; and
before George Eliot knows what has happened she has a full-grown
woman on her hands demanding what neither gipsies, nor dolls, nor St.
Ogg's itself is capable of giving her. First Philip Wakem is
produced, and later Stephen Guest. The weakness of the one and the
coarseness of the other have often been pointed out; but both, in
their weakness and coarseness, illustrate not so much George Eliot's
inability to draw the portrait of a man, as the uncertainty, the
infirmity, and the fumbling which shook her hand when she had to
conceive a fit mate for a heroine. She is in the first place driven
beyond the home world she knew and loved, and forced to set foot in
middle-class drawing-rooms where young men sing all the summer
morning and young women sit embroidering smoking-caps for bazaars.
She feels herself out of her element, as her clumsy satire of what
she calls "good society" proves.

Good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner
engagements six weeks deep, its opera, and its faery ball rooms . . .
gets its science done by Faraday and its religion by the superior
clergy who are to be met in the best houses; how should it have need
of belief and emphasis?

There is no trace of humour or insight there, but only the
vindictiveness of a grudge which we feel to be personal in its
origin. But terrible as the complexity of our social system is in its
demands upon the sympathy and discernment of a novelist straying
across the boundaries, Maggie Tulliver did worse than drag George
Eliot from her natural surroundings. She insisted upon the
introduction of the great emotional scene. She must love; she must
despair; she must be drowned clasping her brother in her arms. The
more one examines the great emotional scenes the more nervously one
anticipates the brewing and gathering and thickening of the cloud
which will burst upon our heads at the moment of crisis in a shower
of disillusionment and verbosity. It is partly that her hold upon
dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack; and partly that she seems
to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue from the effort of
emotional concentration. She allows her heroines to talk too much.
She has little verbal felicity. She lacks the unerring taste which
chooses one sentence and compresses the heart of the scene within
that. "Whom are you going to dance with?" asked Mr. Knightley, at the
Westons' ball. "With you, if you will ask me," said Emma; and she has
said enough. Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we
should have looked out of the window.

Yet, dismiss the heroines without sympathy, confine George Eliot
to the agricultural world of her "remotest past", and you not only
diminish her greatness but lose her true flavour. That greatness is
here we can have no doubt. The width of the prospect, the large
strong outlines of the principal features, the ruddy light of the
early books, the searching power and reflective richness of the later
tempt us to linger and expatiate beyond our limits. But it is upon
the heroines that we would cast a final glance. "I have always been
finding out my religion since I was a little girl," says Dorothea
Casaubon. "I used to pray so much--now I hardly ever pray. I try not
to have desires merely for myself. . . ." She is speaking for them
all. That is their problem. They cannot live without religion, and
they start out on the search for one when they are little girls. Each
has the deep feminine passion for goodness, which makes the place
where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart of the book--still
and cloistered like a place of worship, but that she no longer knows
to whom to pray. In learning they seek their goal; in the ordinary
tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do not
find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness
of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many
ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a
demand for something--they scarcely know what--for something that is
perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot
had far too strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts, and
too broad a humour to mitigate the truth because it was a stern one.
Save for the supreme courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends,
for her heroines, in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more
melancholy. But their story is the incomplete version of the story of
George Eliot herself. For her, too, the burden and the complexity of
womanhood were not enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and
pluck for herself the strange bright fruits of art and knowledge.
Clasping them as few women have ever clasped them, she would not
renounce her own inheritance--the difference of view, the difference
of standard--nor accept an inappropriate reward. Thus we behold her,
a memorable figure, inordinately praised and shrinking from her fame,
despondent, reserved, shuddering back into the arms of love as if
there alone were satisfaction and, it might be, justification, at the
same time reaching out with "a fastidious yet hungry ambition" for
all that life could offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting
her feminine aspirations with the real world of men. Triumphant was
the issue for her, whatever it may have been for her creations, and
as we recollect all that she dared and achieved, how with every
obstacle against her--sex and health and convention--she sought more
knowledge and more freedom till the body, weighted with its double
burden, sank worn out, we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it
in our power to bestow of laurel and rose.

Doubtful as we frequently are whether either the French or the
Americans, who have so much in common with us, can yet understand
English literature, we must admit graver doubts whether, for all
their enthusiasm, the English can understand Russian literature.
Debate might protract itself indefinitely as to what we mean by
"understand". Instances will occur to everybody of American writers
in particular who have written with the highest discrimination of our
literature and of ourselves; who have lived a lifetime among us, and
finally have taken legal steps to become subjects of King George. For
all that, have they understood us, have they not remained to the end
of their days foreigners? Could any one believe that the novels of
Henry James were written by a man who had grown up in the society
which he describes, or that his criticism of English writers was
written by a man who had read Shakespeare without any sense of the
Atlantic Ocean and two or three hundred years on the far side of it
separating his civilisation from ours? A special acuteness and
detachment, a sharp angle of vision the foreigner will often achieve;
but not that absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship
and sense of common values which make for intimacy, and sanity, and
the quick give and take of familiar intercourse.

Not only have we all this to separate us from Russian literature,
but a much more serious barrier--the difference of language. Of all
those who feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the
past twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to
read them in Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed
by critics who have never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or
even heard the language spoken by natives; who have had to depend,
blindly and implicitly, upon the work of translators.

What we are saying amounts to this, then, that we have judged a
whole literature stripped of its style. When you have changed every
word in a sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the
sense a little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in
relation to each other completely, nothing remains except a crude and
coarsened version of the sense. Thus treated, the great Russian
writers are like men deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident
not only of all their clothes, but also of something subtler and more
important--their manners, the idiosyncrasies of their characters.
What remains is, as the English have proved by the fanaticism of
their admiration, something very powerful and very impressive, but it
is difficult to feel sure, in view of these mutilations, how far we
can trust ourselves not to impute, to distort, to read into them an
emphasis which is false.

They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible
catastrophe, for some such figure as that describes the simplicity,
the humanity, startled out of all effort to hide and disguise its
instincts, which Russian literature, whether it is due to translation
or to some more profound cause, makes upon us. We find these
qualities steeping it through, as obvious in the lesser writers as in
the greater. "Learn to make yourselves akin to people. I would even
like to add: make yourself indispensable to them. But let this
sympathy be not with the mind--for it is easy with the mind--but with
the heart, with love towards them." "From the Russian", one would say
instantly, where-ever one chanced on that quotation. The simplicity,
the absence of effort, the assumption that in a world bursting with
misery the chief call upon us is to understand our fellow-sufferers,
"and not with the mind--for it is easy with the mind--but with the
heart"--this is the cloud which broods above the whole of Russian
literature, which lures us from our own parched brilliancy and
scorched thoroughfares to expand in its shade--and of course with
disastrous results. We become awkward and self-conscious; denying our
own qualities, we write with an affectation of goodness and
simplicity which is nauseating in the extreme. We cannot say
"Brother" with simple conviction. There is a story by Mr. Galsworthy
in which one of the characters so addresses another (they are both in
the depths of misfortune). Immediately everything becomes strained
and affected. The English equivalent for "Brother" is "Mate"--a very
different word, with something sardonic in it, an indefinable
suggestion of humour. Met though they are in the depths of misfortune
the two Englishmen who thus accost each other will, we are sure, find
a job, make their fortunes, spend the last years of their lives in
luxury, and leave a sum of money to prevent poor devils from calling
each other "Brother" on the Embankment. But it is common suffering,
rather than common happiness, effort, or desire that produces the
sense of brotherhood. It is the "deep sadness" which Dr. Hagberg
Wright finds typical of the Russian people that creates their
literature.

A generalisation of this kind will, of course, even if it has some
degree of truth when applied to the body of literature, be changed
profoundly when a writer of genius sets to work on it. At once other
questions arise. It is seen that an "attitude" is not simple; it is
highly complex. Men reft of their coats and their manners, stunned by
a railway accident, say hard things, harsh things, unpleasant things,
difficult things, even if they say them with the abandonment and
simplicity which catastrophe has bred in them. Our first impressions
of Tchekov are not of simplicity but of bewilderment. What is the
point of it, and why does he make a story out of this? we ask as we
read story after story. A man falls in love with a married woman, and
they part and meet, and in the end are left talking about their
position and by what means they can be free from "this intolerable
bondage".

"'How? How?' he asked, clutching his head. . . . And it seemed as
though in a little while the solution would be found and then a new
and splendid life would begin." That is the end. A postman drives a
student to the station and all the way the student tries to make the
postman talk, but he remains silent. Suddenly the postman says
unexpectedly, "It's against the regulations to take any one with the
post". And he walks up and down the platform with a look of anger on
his face. "With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty,
with the autumn nights?" Again, that story ends.

But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have
overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without
the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we
say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that
stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing, we
raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is
familiar and the end emphatic--lovers united, villains discomfited,
intrigues exposed--as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can
scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a
note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on
talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense
of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last
notes which complete the harmony. Probably we have to read a great
many stories before we feel, and the feeling is essential to our
satisfaction, that we hold the parts together, and that Tchekov was
not merely rambling disconnectedly, but struck now this note, now
that with intention, in order to complete his meaning.

We have to cast about in order to discover where the emphasis in
these strange stories rightly comes. Tchekov's own words give us a
lead in the right direction. ". . . such a conversation as this
between us", he says, "would have been unthinkable for our parents.
At night they did not talk, but slept sound; we, our generation,
sleep badly, are restless, but talk a great deal, and are always
trying to settle whether we are right or not." Our literature of
social satire and psychological finesse both sprang from that
restless sleep, that incessant talking; but after all, there is an
enormous difference between Tchekov and Henry James, between Tchekov
and Bernard Shaw. Obviously--but where does it arise? Tchekov, too,
is aware of the evils and injustices of the social state; the
condition of the peasants appals him, but the reformer's zeal is not
his--that is not the signal for us to stop. The mind interests him
enormously; he is a most subtle and delicate analyst of human
relations. But again, no; the end is not there. Is it that he is
primarily interested not in the soul's relation with other souls, but
with the soul's relation to health--with the soul's relation to
goodness? These stories are always showing us some affectation, pose,
insincerity. Some woman has got into a false relation; some man has
been perverted by the inhumanity of his circumstances. The soul is
ill; the soul is cured; the soul is not cured. Those are the emphatic
points in his stories.

Once the eye is used to these shades, half the "conclusions" of
fiction fade into thin air; they show like transparences with a light
behind them--gaudy, glaring, superficial. The general tidying up of
the last chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of values so
sonorously trumpeted forth, so heavily underlined, become of the most
rudimentary kind. Nothing is solved, we feel; nothing is rightly held
together. On the other hand, the method which at first seemed so
casual, inconclusive, and occupied with trifles, now appears the
result of an exquisitely original and fastidious taste, choosing
boldly, arranging infallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which
we can find no match save among the Russians themselves. There may be
no answer to these questions, but at the same time let us never
manipulate the evidence so as to produce something fitting, decorous,
agreeable to our vanity. This may not be the way to catch the ear of
the public; after all, they are used to louder music, fiercer
measures; but as the tune sounded so he has written it. In
consequence, as we read these little stories about nothing at all,
the horizon widens; the soul gains an astonishing sense of
freedom.

In reading Tchekov we find ourselves repeating the word "soul"
again and again. It sprinkles his pages. Old drunkards use it freely;
". . . you are high up in the service, beyond all reach, but haven't
real soul, my dear boy . . . there's no strength in it". Indeed, it
is the soul that is the chief character in Russian fiction. Delicate
and subtle in Tchekov, subject to an infinite number of humours and
distempers, it is of greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky; it is
liable to violent diseases and raging fevers, but still the
predominant concern. Perhaps that is why it needs so great an effort
on the part of an English reader to read The Brothers
Karamazov or The Possessed a second time. The "soul" is
alien to him. It is even antipathetic. It has little sense of humour
and no sense of comedy. It is formless. It has slight connection with
the intellect. It is confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable, it
seems, of submitting to the control of logic or the discipline of
poetry. The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating
sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are
composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our
wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the
same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no
more exciting reading. We open the door and find ourselves in a room
full of Russian generals, the tutors of Russian generals, their
step-daughters and cousins, and crowds of miscellaneous people who
are all talking at the tops of their voices about their most private
affairs. But where are we? Surely it is the part of a novelist to
inform us whether we are in an hotel, a flat, or hired lodging.
Nobody thinks of explaining. We are souls, tortured, unhappy souls,
whose only business it is to talk, to reveal, to confess, to draw up
at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed sins which crawl
on the sand at the bottom of us. But, as we listen, our confusion
slowly settles. A rope is flung to us; we catch hold of a soliloquy;
holding on by the skin of our teeth, we are rushed through the water;
feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in a moment
of vision understanding more than we have ever understood before, and
receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from the press
of life at its fullest. As we fly we pick it all up--the names of the
people, their relationships, that they are staying in an hotel at
Roulettenburg, that Polina is involved in an intrigue with the
Marquis de Grieux--but what unimportant matters these are compared
with the soul! It is the soul that matters, its passion, its tumult,
its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness. And if our voices
suddenly rise into shrieks of laughter, or if we are shaken by the
most violent sobbing, what more natural?--it hardly calls for remark.
The pace at which we are living is so tremendous that sparks must
rush off our wheels as we fly. Moreover, when the speed is thus
increased and the elements of the soul are seen, not separately in
scenes of humour or scenes of passion as our slower English minds
conceive them, but streaked, involved, inextricably confused, a new
panorama of the human mind is revealed. The old divisions melt into
each other. Men are at the same time villains and saints; their acts
are at once beautiful and despicable. We love and we hate at the same
time. There is none of that precise division between good and bad to
which we are used. Often those for whom we feel most affection are
the greatest criminals, and the most abject sinners move us to the
strongest admiration as well as love.

Dashed to the crest of the waves, bumped and battered on the
stones at the bottom, it is difficult for an English reader to feel
at ease. The process to which he is accustomed in his own literature
is reversed. If we wished to tell the story of a General's love
affair (and we should find it very difficult in the first place not
to laugh at a General), we should begin with his house; we should
solidify his surroundings. Only when all was ready should we attempt
to deal with the General himself. Moreover, it is not the samovar but
the teapot that rules in England; time is limited; space crowded; the
influence of other points of view, of other books, even of other
ages, makes itself felt. Society is sorted out into lower, middle,
and upper classes, each with its own traditions, its own manners,
and, to some extent, its own language. Whether he wishes it or not,
there is a constant pressure upon an English novelist to recognise
these barriers, and, in consequence, order is imposed on him and some
kind of form; he is inclined to satire rather than to compassion, to
scrutiny of society rather than understanding of individuals
themselves.

No such restraints were laid on Dostoevsky. It is all the same to
him whether you are noble or simple, a tramp or a great lady. Whoever
you are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy,
yeasty, precious stuff, the soul. The soul is not restrained by
barriers. It overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of
others. The simple story of a bank clerk who could not pay for a
bottle of wine spreads, before we know what is happening, into the
lives of his father-in-law and the five mistresses whom his
father-in-law treated abominably, and the postman's life, and the
charwoman's, and the Princesses' who lodged in the same block of
flats; for nothing is outside Dostoevsky's province; and when he is
tired, he does not stop, he goes on. He cannot restrain himself. Out
it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvellous, terrible,
oppressive--the human soul.

There remains the greatest of all novelists--for what else can we
call the author of War and Peace? Shall we find Tolstoi, too,
alien, difficult, a foreigner? Is there some oddity in his angle of
vision which, at any rate until we have become disciples and so lost
our bearings, keeps us at arm's length in suspicion and bewilderment?
From his first words we can be sure of one thing at any rate--here is
a man who sees what we see, who proceeds, too, as we are accustomed
to proceed, not from the inside outwards, but from the outside
inwards. Here is a world in which the postman's knock is heard at
eight o'clock, and people go to bed between ten and eleven. Here is a
man, too, who is no savage, no child of nature; he is educated; he
has had every sort of experience. He is one of those born aristocrats
who have used their privileges to the full. He is metropolitan, not
suburban. His senses, his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well
nourished. There is something proud and superb in the attack of such
a mind and such a body upon life. Nothing seems to escape him.
Nothing glances off him unrecorded. Nobody, therefore, can so convey
the excitement of sport, the beauty of horses, and all the fierce
desirability of the world to the senses of a strong young man. Every
twig, every feather sticks to his magnet. He notices the blue or red
of a child's frock; the way a horse shifts its tail; the sound of a
cough; the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that
have been sewn up. And what his infallible eye reports of a cough or
a trick of the hands his infallible brain refers to something hidden
in the character, so that we know his people, not only by the way
they love and their views on politics and the immortality of the
soul, but also by the way they sneeze and choke. Even in a
translation we feel that we have been set on a mountain-top and had a
telescope put into our hands. Everything is astonishingly clear and
absolutely sharp. Then, suddenly, just as we are exulting, breathing
deep, feeling at once braced and purified, some detail--perhaps the
head of a man--comes at us out of the picture in an alarming way, as
if extruded by the very intensity of its life. "Suddenly a strange
thing happened to me: first I ceased to see what was around me; then
his face seemed to vanish till only the eyes were left, shining over
against mine; next the eyes seemed to be in my own head, and then all
became confused--I could see nothing and was forced to shut my eyes,
in order to break loose from the feeling of pleasure and fear which
his gaze was producing in me. . . ." Again and again we share Masha's
feelings in Family Happiness. One shuts one's eyes to escape
the feeling of pleasure and fear. Often it is pleasure that is
uppermost. In this very story there are two descriptions, one of a
girl walking in a garden at night with her lover, one of a newly
married couple prancing down their drawing-room, which so convey the
feeling of intense happiness that we shut the book to feel it better.
But always there is an element of fear which makes us, like Masha,
wish to escape from the gaze which Tolstoi fixes on us. Is it the
sense, which in real life might harass us, that such happiness as he
describes is too intense to last, that we are on the edge of
disaster? Or is it not that the very intensity of our pleasure is
somehow questionable and forces us to ask, with Pozdnyshev in the
Kreutzer Sonata, "But why live?" Life dominates Tolstoi as the
soul dominates Dostoevsky. There is always at the centre of all the
brilliant and flashing petals of the flower this scorpion, "Why
live?" There is always at the centre of the book some Olenin, or
Pierre, or Levin who gathers into himself all experience, turns the
world round between his fingers, and never ceases to ask, even as he
enjoys it, what is the meaning of it, and what should be our aims. It
is not the priest who shatters our desires most effectively; it is
the man who has known them, and loved them himself. When he derides
them, the world indeed turns to dust and ashes beneath our feet. Thus
fear mingles with our pleasure, and of the three great Russian
writers, it is Tolstoi who most enthralls us and most repels.

But the mind takes its bias from the place of its birth, and no
doubt, when it strikes upon a literature so alien as the Russian,
flies off at a tangent far from the truth.

MISS MITFORD

Speaking truthfully, Mary Russell Mitford and her
Surroundings is not a good book. It neither enlarges the mind nor
purifies the heart. There is nothing in it about Prime Ministers and
not very much about Miss Mitford. Yet, as one is setting out to speak
the truth, one must own that there are certain books which can be
read without the mind and without the heart, but still with
considerable enjoyment. To come to the point, the great merit of
these scrapbooks, for they can scarcely be called biographies, is
that they license mendacity. One cannot believe what Miss Hill says
about Miss Mitford, and thus one is free to invent Miss Mitford for
oneself. Not for a second do we accuse Miss Hill of telling lies.
That infirmity is entirely ours. For example: "Alresford was the
birthplace of one who loved nature as few have loved her, and whose
writings 'breathe the air of the hayfields and the scent of the
hawthorn boughs', and seem to waft to us 'the sweet breezes that blow
over ripened cornfields and daisied meadows'." It is perfectly true
that Miss Mitford was born at Alresford, and yet, when it is put like
that, we doubt whether she was ever born at all. Indeed she was, says
Miss Hill; she was born "on the 16th December, 1787. 'A pleasant
house in truth it was,' Miss Mitford writes. 'The breakfast-room . .
. was a lofty and spacious apartment.'" So Miss Mitford was born in
the breakfast-room about eight-thirty on a snowy morning between the
Doctor's second and third cups of tea. "Pardon me," said Mrs.
Mitford, turning a little pale, but not omitting to add the right
quantity of cream to her husband's tea, "I feel . . ." That is the
way in which Mendacity begins. There is something plausible and even
ingenious in her approaches. The touch about the cream, for instance,
might be called historical, for it is well known that when Mary won
£20,000 in the Irish lottery, the Doctor spent it all upon
Wedgwood china, the winning number being stamped upon the soup plates
in the middle of an Irish harp, the whole being surmounted by the
Mitford arms, and encircled by the motto of Sir John Bertram, one of
William the Conqueror's knights, from whom the Mitfords claimed
descent. "Observe", says Mendacity, "with what an air the Doctor
drinks his tea, and how she, poor lady, contrives to curtsey as she
leaves the room." Tea? I inquire, for the Doctor, though a fine
figure of a man, is already purple and profuse, and foams like a
crimson cock over the frill of his fine laced shirt. "Since the
ladies have left the room", Mendacity begins, and goes on to make up
a pack of lies with the sole object of proving that Dr. Mitford kept
a mistress in the purlieus of Reading and paid her money on the
pretence that he was investing it in a new method of lighting and
heating houses invented by the Marquis de Chavannes. It came to the
same thing in the end--to the King's Bench Prison, that is to say;
but instead of allowing us to recall the literary and historical
associations of the place, Mendacity wanders off to the window and
distracts us again by the platitudinous remark that it is still
snowing. There is something very charming in an ancient snowstorm.
The weather has varied almost as much in the course of generations as
mankind. The snow of those days was more formally shaped and a good
deal softer than the snow of ours, just as an eighteenth-century cow
was no more like our cows than she was like the florid and fiery cows
of Elizabethan pastures. Sufficient attention has scarcely been paid
to this aspect of literature, which, it cannot be denied, has its
importance.

Our brilliant young men might do worse, when in search of a
subject, than devote a year or two to cows in literature, snow in
literature, the daisy in Chaucer and in Coventry Patmore. At any
rate, the snow falls heavily. The Portsmouth mail-coach has already
lost its way; several ships have foundered, and Margate pier has been
totally destroyed. At Hatfield Peveral twenty sheep have been buried,
and though one supports itself by gnawing wurzels which it has found
near it, there is grave reason to fear that the French king's coach
has been blocked on the road to Colchester. It is now the 16th of
February 1808.

Poor Mrs. Mitford! Twenty-one years ago she left the
breakfast-room, and no news has yet been received of her child. Even
Mendacity is a little ashamed of itself, and, picking up Mary
Russell Mitford and her Surroundings, assures us that everything
will come right if we possess ourselves in patience. The French
king's coach was on its way to Bocking; at Becking lived Lord and
Lady Charles Murray-Aynsley; and Lord Charles was shy. Lord Charles
had always been shy. Once when Mary Mitford was five years
old--sixteen years, that is, before the sheep were lost and the
French king went to Bocking--Mary "threw him into an agony of
blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for that of my papa".
He had indeed to leave the room. Miss Hill, who, somewhat strangely,
finds the society of Lord and Lady Charles pleasant, does not wish to
quit it without "introducing an incident in connection with them
which took place in the month of February, 1808". But is Miss Mitford
concerned in it? we ask, for there must be an end of trifling. To
some extent, that is to say, Lady Charles was a cousin of the
Mitfords, and Lord Charles was shy. Mendacity is quite ready to deal
with "the incident" even on these terms; but, we repeat, we have had
enough of trifling. Miss Mitford may not be a great woman; for all we
know she was not even a good one; but we have certain
responsibilities as a reviewer which we are not going to evade.

There is, to begin with, English literature. A sense of the beauty
of nature has never been altogether absent, however much the cow may
change from age to age, from English poetry. Nevertheless, the
difference between Pope and Wordsworth in this respect is very
considerable. Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798; Our
Village in 1824. One being in verse and the other in prose, it is
not necessary to labour a comparison which contains, however, not
only the elements of justice, but the seeds of many volumes. Like her
great predecessor, Miss Mitford much preferred the country to the
town; and thus, perhaps, it may not be inopportune to dwell for a
moment upon the King of Saxony, Mary Anning, and the ichthyosaurus.
Let alone the fact that Mary Anning and Mary Mitford had a Christian
name in common, they are further connected by what can scarcely be
called a fact, but may, without hazard, be called a probability. Miss
Mitford was looking for fossils at Lyme Regis only fifteen years
before Mary Anning found one. The King of Saxony visited Lyme in
1844, and seeing the head of an ichthyosaurus in Mary Anning's
window, asked her to drive to Pinny and explore the rocks. While they
were looking for fossils, an old woman seated herself in the King's
coach--was she Mary Mitford? Truth compels us to say that she was
not; but there is no doubt, and we are not trifling when we say it,
that Mary Mitford often expressed a wish that she had known Mary
Anning, and it is singularly unfortunate to have to state that she
never did. For we have reached the year 1844; Mary Mitford is
fifty-seven years of age, and so far, thanks to Mendacity and its
trifling ways, all we know of her is that she did not know Mary
Anning, had not found an ichthyosaurus, had not been out in a
snowstorm, and had not seen the King of France.

It is time to wring the creature's neck, and begin again at the
very beginning.

What considerations, then, had weight with Miss Hill when she
decided to write Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings?
Three emerge from the rest, and may be held of paramount importance.
In the first place, Miss Mitford was a lady; in the second, she was
born in the year 1787; and in the third, the stock of female
characters who lend themselves to biographic treatment by their own
sex is, for one reason or another, running short. For instance,
little is known of Sappho, and that little is not wholly to her
credit. Lady Jane Grey has merit, but is undeniably obscure. Of
George Sand, the more we know the less we approve. George Eliot was
led into evil ways which not all her philosophy can excuse. The
Brontës, however highly we rate their genius, lacked that
indefinable something which marks the lady; Harriet Martineau was an
atheist; Mrs. Browning was a married woman; Jane Austen, Fanny
Burney, and Maria Edgeworth have been done already; so that, what
with one thing and another, Mary Russell Mitford is the only woman
left.

There is no need to labour the extreme importance of the date when
we see the word "surroundings" on the back of a book. Surroundings,
as they are called, are invariably eighteenth-century surroundings.
When we come, as of course we do, to that phrase which relates how
"as we looked upon the steps leading down from the upper room, we
fancied we saw the tiny figure jumping from step to step", it would
be the grossest outrage upon our sensibilities to be told that those
steps were Athenian, Elizabethan, or Parisian. They were, of course,
eighteenth-century steps, leading down from the old panelled room
into the shady garden, where, tradition has it, William Pitt played
marbles, or, if we like to be bold, where on still summer days we can
almost fancy that we hear the drums of Bonaparte on the coast of
France. Bonaparte is the limit of the imagination on one side, as
Monmouth is on the other; it would be fatal if the imagination took
to toying with Prince Albert or sporting with King John. But fancy
knows her place, and there is no need to labour the point that her
place is the eighteenth century. The other point is more obscure. One
must be a lady. Yet what that means, and whether we like what it
means, may both be doubtful. If we say that Jane Austen was a lady
and that Charlotte Brontë was not one, we do as much as need be
done in the way of definition, and commit ourselves to neither
side.

It is undoubtedly because of their reticence that Miss Hill is on
the side of the ladies. They sigh things off and they smile things
off, but they never seize the silver table by the legs or dash the
teacups on the floor. It is in many ways a great convenience to have
a subject who can be trusted to live a long life without once raising
her voice. Sixteen years is a considerable stretch of time, but of a
lady it is enough to say, "Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of
her life and here she got to know and love not only their own
beautiful grounds but also every turn of the surrounding shady
lanes". Her loves were vegetable, and her lanes were shady. Then, of
course, she was educated at the school where Jane Austen and Mrs.
Sherwood had been educated. She visited Lyme Regis, and there is
mention of the Cobb. She saw London from the top of St. Paul's, and
London was much smaller then than it is now. She changed from one
charming house to another, and several distinguished literary
gentlemen paid her compliments and came to tea. When the dining-room
ceiling fell down it did not fall on her head, and when she took a
ticket in a lottery she did win the prize. If in the foregoing
sentences there are any words of more than two syllables, it is our
fault and not Miss Hill's; and to do that writer justice, there are
not many whole sentences in the book which are neither quoted from
Miss Mitford nor supported by the authority of Mr. Crissy.

But how dangerous a thing is life! Can one be sure that anything
not wholly made of mahogany will to the very end stand empty in the
sun? Even cupboards have their secret springs, and when,
inadvertently we are sure, Miss Hill touches this one, out, terrible
to relate, topples a stout old gentleman. In plain English, Miss
Mitford had a father. There is nothing actually improper in that.
Many women have had fathers. But Miss Mitford's father was kept in a
cupboard; that is to say, he was not a nice father. Miss Hill even
goes so far as to conjecture that when "an imposing procession of
neighbours and friends" followed him to the grave, "we cannot help
thinking that this was more to show sympathy and respect for Miss
Mitford than from special respect for him". Severe as the judgement
is, the gluttonous, bibulous, amorous old man did something to
deserve it. The less said about him the better. Only, if from your
earliest childhood your father has gambled and speculated, first with
your mother's fortune, then with your own, spent your earnings,
driven you to earn more, and spent that too; if in old age he has
lain upon a sofa and insisted that fresh air is bad for daughters;
if, dying at length, he has left debts that can only be paid by
selling everything you have or sponging upon the charity of
friends--then even a lady sometimes raises her voice. Miss Mitford
herself spoke out once. "It was grief to go; there I had toiled and
striven and tasted as deeply of bitter anxiety, of fear, and of hope
as often falls to the lot of woman." What language for a lady to use!
for a lady, too, who owns a teapot. There is a drawing of the teapot
at the bottom of the page. But it is now of no avail; Miss Mitford
has smashed it to smithereens. That is the worst of writing about
ladies; they have fathers as well as teapots. On the other hand, some
pieces of Dr. Mitford's Wedgwood dinner service are still in
existence, and a copy of Adam's Geography, which Mary won as a prize
at school, is "in our temporary possession". If there is nothing
improper in the suggestion, might not the next book be devoted
entirely to them?

DR. BENTLEY

As we saunter through those famous courts where Dr. Bentley once
reigned supreme we sometimes catch sight of a figure hurrying on its
way to Chapel or Hall which, as it disappears, draws our thoughts
enthusiastically after it. For that man, we are told, has the whole
of Sophocles at his finger-ends; knows Homer by heart; reads Pindar
as we read the Times; and spends his life, save for these
short excursions to eat and pray, wholly in the company of the
Greeks. It is true that the infirmities of our education prevent us
from appreciating his emendations as they deserve; his life's work is
a sealed book to us; none the less, we treasure up the last flicker
of his black gown, and feel as if a bird of Paradise had flashed by
us, so bright is his spirit's raiment, and in the murk of a November
evening we had been privileged to see it winging its way to roost in
fields of amaranth and beds of moly. Of all men, great scholars are
the most mysterious, the most august. Since it is unlikely that we
shall ever be admitted to their intimacy, or see much more of them
than a black gown crossing a court at dusk, the best we can do is to
read their lives--for example, the Life of Dr. Bentley by
Bishop Monk.

There we shall find much that is odd and little that is
reassuring. The greatest of our scholars, the man who read Greek as
the most expert of us read English not merely with an accurate sense
of meaning and grammar but with a sensibility so subtle and
widespread that he perceived relations and suggestions of language
which enabled him to fetch up from oblivion lost lines and inspire
new life into the little fragments that remained, the man who should
have been steeped in beauty (if what they say of the Classics is
true) as a honey-pot is ingrained with sweetness was, on the
contrary, the most quarrelsome of mankind.

"I presume that there are not many examples of an individual who
has been a party in six distinct suits before the Court of King's
Bench within the space of three years", his biographer remarks; and
adds that Bentley won them all. It is difficult to deny his
conclusion that though Dr. Bentley might have been a first-rate
lawyer or a great soldier "such a display suited any character rather
than that of a learned and dignified clergyman". Not all these
disputes, however, sprung from his love of literature. The charges
against which he had to defend himself were directed against him as
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was habitually absent from
chapel; his expenditure upon building and upon his household was
excessive; he used the college seal at meetings which did not consist
of the statutable number of sixteen, and so on. In short, the career
of the Master of Trinity was one continuous series of acts of
aggression and defiance, in which Dr. Bentley treated the Society of
Trinity College as a grown man might treat an importunate rabble of
street boys. Did they dare to hint that the staircase at the Lodge
which admitted four persons abreast was quite wide enough?--did they
refuse to sanction his expenditure upon a new one? Meeting them in
the Great Court one evening after chapel he proceeded urbanely to
question them. They refused to budge. Whereupon, with a sudden
alteration of colour and voice, Bentley demanded whether "they had
forgotten his rusty sword?" Mr. Michael Hutchinson and some others,
upon whose backs the weight of that weapon would have first
descended, brought pressure upon their seniors. The bill for
£350 was paid and their preferment secured. But Bentley did not
wait for this act of submission to finish his staircase.

So it went on, year after year. Nor was the arrogance of his
behaviour always justified by the splendour or utility of the objects
he had in view--the creation of the Backs, the erection of an
observatory, the foundation of a laboratory. More trivial desires
were gratified with the same tyranny. Sometimes he wanted coal;
sometimes bread and ale; and then Madame Bentley, sending her servant
with a snuffbox in token of authority, got from the butteries at the
expense of the college a great deal more of these commodities than
the college thought that Dr. Bentley ought to require. Again, when he
had four pupils to lodge with him who paid him handsomely for their
board, it was drawn from the College, at the command of the
snuff-box, for nothing. The principles of "delicacy and good feeling"
which the Master might have been expected to observe (great scholar
as he was, steeped in the wine of the classics) went for nothing. His
argument that the "few College loaves" upon which the four young
patricians were nourished were amply repaid by the three sash windows
which he had put into their rooms at his own expense failed to
convince the Fellows. And when, on Trinity Sunday 1719, the Fellows
found the famous College ale not to their liking, they were scarcely
satisfied when the butler told them that it had been brewed by the
Master's orders, from the Master's malt, which was stored in the
Master's granary, and though damaged by "an insect called the weevil"
had been paid for at the very high rates which the Master
demanded.

Still these battles over bread and beer are trifles and domestic
trifles at that. His conduct in his profession will throw more light
upon our inquiry. For, released from brick and building, bread and
beer, patricians and their windows, it may be found that he expanded
in the atmosphere of Homer, Horace, and Manilius, and proved in his
study the benign nature of those influences which have been wafted
down to us through the ages. But there the evidence is even less to
the credit of the dead languages. He acquitted himself magnificently,
all agree, in the great controversy about the letters of Phalaris.
His temper was excellent and his learning prodigious. But that
triumph was succeeded by a series of disputes which force upon us the
extraordinary spectacle of men of learning and genius, of authority
and divinity, brawling about Greek and Latin texts, and calling each
other names for all the world like bookies on a racecourse or
washerwomen in a back street. For this vehemence of temper and
virulence of language were not confined to Bentley alone; they appear
unhappily characteristic of the profession as a whole. Early in life,
in the year 1691, a quarrel was fastened upon him by his brother
chaplain Hody for writing Malelas, not as Hody preferred, Malela. A
controversy in which Bentley displayed learning and wit, and Hody
accumulated endless pages of bitter argument against the letter
s ensued. Hody was worsted, and "there is too much reason to
believe, that the offence given by this trivial cause was never
afterwards healed". Indeed, to mend a line was to break a friendship.
James Gronovius of Leyden--"homunculus eruditione mediocri, ingenio
nullo", as Bentley called him--attacked Bentley for ten years because
Bentley had succeeded in correcting a fragment of Callimachus where
he had failed.

But Gronovius was by no means the only scholar who resented the
success of a rival with a rancour that grey hairs and forty years
spent in editing the classics failed to subdue. In all the chief
towns of Europe lived men like the notorious de Pauw of Utrecht, "a
person who has justly been considered the pest and disgrace of
letters", who, when a new theory or new edition appeared, banded
themselves together to deride and humiliate the scholar. ". . . all
his writings", Bishop Monk remarks of de Pauw, "prove him to be
devoid of candour, good faith, good manners, and every gentlemanly
feeling: and while he unites all the defects and bad qualities that
were ever found in a critic or commentator, he adds one peculiar to
himself, an incessant propensity to indecent allusions." With such
tempers and such habits it is not strange that the scholars of those
days sometimes ended lives made intolerable by bitterness, poverty,
and neglect by their own hands, like Johnson, who after a lifetime
spent in the detection of minute errors of construction, went mad and
drowned himself in the meadows near Nottingham. On May 20, 1712,
Trinity College was shocked to find that the professor of Hebrew, Dr.
Sike, had hanged himself "some time this evening, before candlelight,
in his sash". When Kuster died, it was reported that he, too, had
killed himself. And so, in a sense, he had. For when his body was
opened "there was found a cake of sand along the lower region of his
belly. This, I take it, was occasioned by his sitting nearly double,
and writing on a very low table, surrounded with three or four
circles of books placed on the ground, which was the situation we
usually found him in." The minds of poor schoolmasters, like John Ker
of the dissenting Academy, who had had the high gratification of
dining with Dr. Bentley at the Lodge, when the talk fell upon the use
of the word equidem, were so distorted by a lifetime of
neglect and study that they went home, collected all uses of the word
equidem which contradicted the Doctor's opinion, returned to
the Lodge, anticipating in their simplicity a warm welcome, met the
Doctor issuing to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed
him down the street in spite of his indifference and annoyance and,
being refused even a word of farewell, went home to brood over their
injuries and wait the day of revenge.

But the bickerings and animosities of the smaller fry were
magnified, not obliterated, by the Doctor himself in the conduct of
his own affairs. The courtesy and good temper which he had shown in
his early controversies had worn away. ". . . a course of violent
animosities and the indulgence of unrestrained indignation for many
years had impaired both his taste and judgement in controversy", and
he condescended, though the subject in dispute was the Greek
Testament, to call his antagonist "maggot", "vermin", "gnawing rat",
and "cabbage head", to refer to the darkness of his complexion, and
to insinuate that his wits were crazed, which charge he supported by
dwelling on the fact that his brother, a clergyman, wore a beard to
his girdle.

Violent, pugnacious, and unscrupulous, Dr. Bentley survived these
storms and agitations, and remained, though suspended from his
degrees and deprived of his mastership, seated at the Lodge
imperturbably. Wearing a broad-brimmed hat indoors to protect his
eyes, smoking his pipe, enjoying his port, and expounding to his
friends his doctrine of the digamma, Bentley lived those eighty years
which, he said, were long enough "to read everything which was worth
reading", "Et tunc", he added, in his peculiar manner,

Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago.

A small square stone marked his grave in Trinity College, but the
Fellows refused to record upon it the fact that he had been their
Master.

But the strangest sentence in this strange story has yet to be
written, and Bishop Monk writes it as if it were a commonplace
requiring no comment. "For a person who was neither a poet, nor
possessed of poetical taste to venture upon such a task was no common
presumption." The task was to detect every slip of language in
Paradise Lost, and all instances of bad taste and incorrect
imagery. The result was notoriously lamentable. Yet in what, we may
ask, did it differ from those in which Bentley was held to have
acquitted himself magnificently? And if Bentley was incapable of
appreciating the poetry of Milton, how can we accept his verdict upon
Horace and Homer? And if we cannot trust implicitly to scholars, and
if the study of Greek is supposed to refine the manners and purify
the soul--but enough. Our scholar has returned from Hall; his lamp is
lit; his studies are resumed; and it is time that our profane
speculations should have an end. Besides, all this happened many,
many years ago.

LADY DOROTHY NEVILL

She had stayed, in a humble capacity, for a week in the ducal
household. She had seen the troops of highly decorated human beings
descending in couples to eat, and ascending in couples to bed. She
had, surreptitiously, from a gallery, observed the Duke himself
dusting the miniatures in the glass cases, while the Duchess let her
crochet fall from her hands as if in utter disbelief that the world
had need of crochet. From an upper window she had seen, as far as eye
could reach, gravel paths swerving round isles of greenery and losing
themselves in little woods designed to shed the shade without the
severity of forests; she had watched the ducal carriage bowling in
and out of the prospect, and returning a different way from the way
it went. And what was her verdict? "A lunatic asylum."

It is true that she was a lady's-maid, and that Lady Dorothy
Nevill, had she encountered her on the stairs, would have made an
opportunity to point out that that is a very different thing from
being a lady.

My mother never failed to point out the folly of workwomen,
shop-girls, and the like calling each other "Ladies". All this sort
of thing seemed to her to be mere vulgar humbug, and she did not fail
to say so.

What can we point out to Lady Dorothy Nevill? that with all her
advantages she had never learned to spell? that she could not write a
grammatical sentence? that she lived for eighty-seven years and did
nothing but put food into her mouth and slip gold through her
fingers? But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous
indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that
high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely
inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the
most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic
asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of
England.

Moreover, the Walpoles are not ducal. Horace Walpole's mother was
a Miss Shorter; there is no mention of Lady Dorothy's mother in the
present volume, but her great-grandmother was Mrs. Oldfield the
actress, and, to her credit, Lady Dorothy was "exceedingly proud" of
the fact. Thus she was not an extreme case of aristocracy; she was
confined rather to a bird-cage than to an asylum; through the bars
she saw people walking at large, and once or twice she made a
surprising little flight into the open air. A gayer, brighter, more
vivacious specimen of the caged tribe can seldom have existed; so
that one is forced at times to ask whether what we call living in a
cage is not the fate that wise people, condemned to a single sojourn
upon earth, would choose. To be at large is, after all, to be shut
out; to waste most of life in accumulating the money to buy and the
time to enjoy what the Lady Dorothys find clustering and glowing
about their cradles when their eyes first open--as hers opened in the
year 1826 at number eleven Berkeley Square. Horace Walpole had lived
there. Her father, Lord Orford, gambled it away in one night's play
the year after she was born. But Wolterton Hall, in Norfolk, was full
of carving and mantelpieces, and there were rare trees in the garden,
and a large and famous lawn. No novelist could wish a more charming
and even romantic environment in which to set the story of two little
girls, growing up, wild yet secluded, reading Bossuet with their
governess, and riding out on their ponies at the head of the tenantry
on polling day. Nor can one deny that to have had the author of the
following letter among one's ancestors would have been a source of
inordinate pride. It is addressed to the Norwich Bible Society, which
had invited Lord Orford to become its president:

I have long been addicted to the Gaming Table. I have lately taken
to the Turf. I fear I frequently blaspheme. But I have never
distributed religious tracts. All this was known to you and your
Society. Notwithstanding which you think me a fit person to be your
president. God forgive your hypocrisy.

It was not Lord Orford who was in the cage on that occasion. But,
alas! Lord Orford owned another country house, Ilsington Hall, in
Dorsetshire, and there Lady Dorothy came in contact first with the
mulberry tree, and later with Mr. Thomas Hardy; and we get our first
glimpse of the bars. We do not pretend to the ghost of an enthusiasm
for Sailors' Homes in general; no doubt mulberry trees are much nicer
to look at; but when it comes to calling people "vandals" who cut
them down to build houses, and to having footstools made from the
wood, and to carving upon those footstools inscriptions which testify
that "often and often has King George III taken his tea" under this
very footstool, then we want to protest--"Surely you must mean
Shakespeare?" But as her subsequent remarks upon Mr. Hardy tend to
prove, Lady Dorothy does not mean Shakespeare. She "warmly
appreciated" the works of Mr. Hardy, and used to complain "that the
county families were too stupid to appreciate his genius at its
proper worth". George the Third drinking his tea; the county families
failing to appreciate Mr. Hardy: Lady Dorothy is undoubtedly behind
the bars.

Yet no story more aptly illustrates the barrier which we perceive
hereafter between Lady Dorothy and the outer world than the story of
Charles Darwin and the blankets. Among her recreations Lady Dorothy
made a hobby of growing orchids, and thus got into touch with "the
great naturalist". Mrs. Darwin, inviting her to stay with them,
remarked with apparent simplicity that she had heard that people who
moved much in London society were fond of being tossed in blankets.
"I am afraid", her letter ended, "we should hardly be able to offer
you anything of that sort." Whether in fact the necessity of tossing
Lady Dorothy in a blanket had been seriously debated at Down, or
whether Mrs. Darwin obscurely hinted her sense of some incongruity
between her husband and the lady of the orchids, we do not know. But
we have a sense of two worlds in collision; and it is not the Darwin
world that emerges in fragments. More and more do we see Lady Dorothy
hopping from perch to perch, picking at groundsel here, and at
hempseed there, indulging in exquisite trills and roulades, and
sharpening her beak against a lump of sugar in a large, airy,
magnificently equipped bird-cage. The cage was full of charming
diversions. Now she illuminated leaves which had been macerated to
skeletons; now she interested herself in improving the breed of
donkeys; next she took up the cause of silkworms, almost threatened
Australia with a plague of them, and "actually succeeded in obtaining
enough silk to make a dress"; again she was the first to discover
that wood, gone green with decay, can be made, at some expense, into
little boxes; she went into the question of funguses and established
the virtues of the neglected English truffle; she imported rare fish;
spent a great deal of energy in vainly trying to induce storks and
Cornish choughs to breed in Sussex; painted on china; emblazoned
heraldic arms, and, attaching whistles to the tails of pigeons,
produced wonderful effects "as of an aerial orchestra" when they flew
through the air. To the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit of
investigating the proper way of cooking guinea-pigs; but Lady Dorothy
was one of the first to serve up a dish of these little creatures at
luncheon in Charles Street.

But all the time the door of the cage was ajar. Raids were made
into what Mr. Nevill calls "Upper Bohemia"; from which Lady Dorothy
returned with "authors, journalists, actors, actresses, or other
agreeable and amusing people". Lady Dorothy's judgement is proved by
the fact that they seldom misbehaved, and some indeed became quite
domesticated, and wrote her "very gracefully turned letters". But
once or twice she made a flight beyond the cage herself. "These
horrors", she said, alluding to the middle class, "are so clever and
we are so stupid; but then look how well they are educated, while our
children learn nothing but how to spend their parents' money!" She
brooded over the fact. Something was going wrong. She was too shrewd
and too honest not to lay the blame partly at least upon her own
class. "I suppose she can just about read?" she said of one lady
calling herself cultured; and of another, "She is indeed curious and
well adapted to open bazaars". But to our thinking her most
remarkable flight took place a year or two before her death, in the
Victoria and Albert Museum:

I do so agree with you, she wrote--though I ought not to say
so--that the upper class are very--I don't know what to say--but they
seem to take no interest in anything--but golfing, etc. One day I was
at the Victoria and Albert Museum, just a few sprinkles of legs, for
I am sure they looked too frivolous to have bodies and souls attached
to them--but what softened the sight to my eyes were 2 little Japs
poring over each article with a handbook . . . our bodies, of course,
giggling and looking at nothing. Still worse, not one soul of the
higher class visible: in fact I never heard of any one of them
knowing of the place, and for this we are spending millions--it is
all too painful.

It was all too painful, and the guillotine, she felt, loomed
ahead. That catastrophe she was spared, for who could wish to cut off
the head of a pigeon with a whistle attached to its tail? But if the
whole bird-cage had been overturned and the aerial orchestra sent
screaming and fluttering through the air, we can be sure, as Mr.
Joseph Chamberlain told her, that her conduct would have been "a
credit to the British aristocracy".

ARCHBISHOP THOMSON

The origin of Archbishop Thomson was obscure. His great-uncle "may
reasonably be supposed" to have been "an ornament to the middle
classes". His aunt married a gentleman who was present at the murder
of Gustavus III of Sweden; and his father met his death at the age of
eighty-seven by treading on a cat in the early hours of the morning.
The physical vigour which this anecdote implies was combined in the
Archbishop with powers of intellect which promised success in
whatever profession he adopted. At Oxford it seemed likely that he
would devote himself to philosophy or science. While reading for his
degree he found time to write the Outlines of the Laws of
Thought, which "immediately became a recognised text-book for
Oxford classes". But though poetry, philosophy, medicine, and the law
held out their temptations he put such thoughts aside, or never
entertained them, having made up his mind from the first to dedicate
himself to Divine service. The measure of his success in the more
exalted sphere is attested by the following facts: Ordained deacon in
1842 at the age of twenty-three, he became Dean and Bursar of Queen's
College, Oxford, in 1845; Provost in 1855, Bishop of Gloucester and
Bristol in 1861, and Archbishop of York in 1862. Thus at the early
age of forty-three he stood next in rank to the Archbishop of
Canterbury himself; and it was commonly though erroneously expected
that he would in the end attain to that dignity also.

It is a matter of temperament and belief whether you read this
list with respect or with boredom; whether you look upon an
archbishop's hat as a crown or as an extinguisher. If, like the
present reviewer, you are ready to hold the simple faith that the
outer order corresponds to the inner--that a vicar is a good man, a
canon a better man, and an archbishop the best man of all--you will
find the study of the Archbishop's life one of extreme fascination.
He has turned aside from poetry and philosophy and law, and
specialised in virtue. He has dedicated himself to the service of the
Divine. His spiritual proficiency has been such that he has developed
from deacon to dean, from dean to bishop, and from bishop to
archbishop in the short space of twenty years. As there are only two
archbishops in the whole of England the inference seems to be that he
is the second best man in England; his hat is the proof of it. Even
in a material sense his hat was one of the largest; it was larger
than Mr. Gladstone's; larger than Thackeray's; larger than Dickens's;
it was in fact, so his hatter told him and we are inclined to agree,
an "eight full." Yet he began much as other men begin. He struck an
undergraduate in a fit of temper and was rusticated; he wrote a
text-book of logic and rowed a very good oar. But after he was
ordained his diary shows that the specialising process had begun. He
thought a great deal about the state of his soul; about "the
monstrous tumour of Simony"; about Church reform; and about the
meaning of Christianity. "Self-renunciation", he came to the
conclusion, "is the foundation of Christian Religion and Christian
Morals. . . . The highest wisdom is that which can enforce and
cultivate this self-renunciation. Hence (against Cousin) I hold that
religion is higher far than philosophy." There is one mention of
chemists and capillarity, but science and philosophy were, even at
this early stage, in danger of being crowded out. Soon the diary
takes a different tone. "He seems", says his biographer, "to have had
no time for committing his thoughts to paper"; he records his
engagements only, and he dines out almost every night. Sir Henry
Taylor, whom he met at one of these parties, described him as
"simple, solid, good, capable, and pleasing". Perhaps it was his
solidity combined with his "eminently scientific" turn of mind, his
blandness as well as his bulk, that impressed some of these great
people with the confidence that in him the Church had found a very
necessary champion. His "brawny logic" and massive frame seemed to
fit him to grapple with a task that taxed the strongest--how, that
is, to reconcile the scientific discoveries of the age with religion,
and even prove them "some of its strongest witnesses for the truth".
If any one could do this Thomson could; his practical ability,
unhampered by any mystical or dreaming tendency, had already proved
itself in the conduct of the business affairs of his College. From
Bishop he became almost instantly Archbishop; and in becoming
Archbishop he became Primate of England, Governor of the Charterhouse
and King's College, London, patron of one hundred and twenty livings,
with the Archdeaconries of York, Cleveland, and the East Riding in
his gift, and the Canonries and Prebends in York Minster.
Bishopthorpe itself was an enormous palace; he was immediately faced
by the "knotty question" of whether to buy all the furniture--"much
of it only poor stuff"--or to furnish the house anew, which would
cost a fortune. Moreover there were seven cows in the park; but
these, perhaps, were counterbalanced by nine children in the nursery.
Then the Prince and Princess of Wales came to stay, and the
Archbishop took upon himself the task of furnishing the Princess's
apartments. He went up to London and bought eight Moderator lamps,
two Spanish figures holding candles, and reminded himself of the
necessity of buying "soap for Princess". But meanwhile far more
serious matters claimed every ounce of his strength. Already he had
been exhorted to "wield the sure lance of your brawny logic against
the sophistries" of the authors of Essays and Reviews, and had
responded in a work called Aids to Faith. Near at hand the
town of Sheffield, with its large population of imperfectly educated
working men, was a breeding ground of scepticism and discontent. The
Archbishop made it his special charge. He was fond of watching the
rolling of armour plate, and constantly addressed meetings of working
men. "Now what are these Nihilisms, and Socialisms, and Communisms,
and Fenianisms, and Secret Societies--what do they all mean?" he
asked. "Selfishness," he replied, and "assertion of one class against
the rest is at the bottom of them all". There was a law of nature, he
said, by which wages went up and wages went down. "You must accept
the declivity as well as the ascent. . . . If we could only get
people to learn that, then things would go on a great deal better and
smoother." And the working men of Sheffield responded by giving him
five hundred pieces of cutlery mounted in sterling silver. But
presumably there were a certain number of knives among the spoons and
the forks.

Bishop Colenso, however, was far more troublesome than the working
men of Sheffield; and the Ritualists vexed him so persistently that
even his vast strength felt the strain. The questions which were
referred to him for decision were peculiarly fitted to tease and
annoy even a man of his bulk and his blandness. Shall a drunkard
found dead in a ditch, or a burglar who has fallen through a
skylight, be given the benefit of the Burial Service? he was asked.
The question of lighted candles was "most difficult"; the wearing of
coloured stoles and the administration of the mixed chalice taxed him
considerably; and finally there was the Rev. John Purchas, who,
dressed in cope, alb, biretta and stole "cross-wise", lit candles and
extinguished them "for no special reason"; filled a vessel with black
powder and rubbed it into the foreheads of his congregation; and hung
over the Holy Table "a figure, image, or stuffed skin of a dove, in a
flying attitude". The Archbishop's temper, usually so positive and
imperturbable, was gravely ruffled, "Will there ever come a time when
it will be thought a crime to have striven to keep the Church of
England as representing the common sense of the Nation?" he asked. "I
suppose it may, but I shall not see it. I have gone through a good
deal, but I do not repent of having done my best." If, for a moment,
the Archbishop himself could ask such a question, we must confess to
a state of complete bewilderment. What has become of our
superlatively good man? He is harassed and cumbered; spends his time
settling questions about stuffed pigeons and coloured petticoats;
writes over eighty letters before breakfast sometimes; scarcely has
time to run over to Paris and buy his daughter a bonnet; and in the
end has to ask himself whether one of these days his conduct will not
be considered a crime.

Was it a crime? And if so, was it his fault? Did he not start out
in the belief that Christianity had something to do with renunciation
and was not entirely a matter of common sense? If honours and
obligations, pomps and possessions, accumulated and encrusted him,
how, being an Archbishop, could he refuse to accept them? Princesses
must have their soap; palaces must have their furniture; children
must have their cows. And, pathetic though it seems, he never
completely lost his interest in science. He wore a pedometer; he was
one of the first to use a camera; he believed in the future of the
typewriter; and in his last years he tried to mend a broken clock. He
was a delightful father too; he wrote witty, terse, sensible letters;
his good stories were much to the point; and he died in harness.
Certainly he was a very able man, but if we insist upon goodness--is
it easy, is it possible, for a good man to be an Archbishop?

Young men and women beginning to write are generally given the
plausible but utterly impracticable advice to write what they have to
write as shortly as possible, as clearly as possible, and without
other thought in their minds except to say exactly what is in them.
Nobody ever adds on these occasions the one thing needful: "And be
sure you choose your patron wisely", though that is the gist of the
whole matter. For a book is always written for somebody to read, and,
since the patron is not merely the paymaster, but also in a very
subtle and insidious way the instigator and inspirer of what is
written, it is of the utmost importance that he should be a desirable
man.

But who, then, is the desirable man--the patron who will cajole
the best out of the writer's brain and bring to birth the most varied
and vigorous progeny of which he is capable? Different ages have
answered the question differently. The Elizabethans, to speak
roughly, chose the aristocracy to write for and the playhouse public.
The eighteenth-century patron was a combination of coffee-house wit
and Grub Street bookseller. In the nineteenth century the great
writers wrote for the half-crown magazines and the leisured classes.
And looking back and applauding the splendid results of these
different alliances, it all seems enviably simple, and plain as a
pikestaff compared with our own predicament--for whom should we
write? For the present supply of patrons is of unexampled and
bewildering variety. There is the daily Press, the weekly Press, the
monthly Press; the English public and the American public; the
bestseller public and the worst-seller public; the highbrow public
and the red-blood public; all now organised self-conscious entities
capable through their various mouthpieces of making their needs known
and their approval or displeasure felt. Thus the writer who has been
moved by the sight of the first crocus in Kensington Gardens has,
before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a crowd of competitors
the particular patron who suits him best. It is futile to say,
"Dismiss them all; think only of your crocus", because writing is a
method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect crocus until
it has been shared. The first man or the last may write for himself
alone, but he is an exception and an unenviable one at that, and the
gulls are welcome to his works if the gulls can read them.

Granted, then, that every writer has some public or other at the
end of his pen, the high-minded will say that it should be a
submissive public, accepting obediently whatever he likes to give it.
Plausible as the theory sounds, great risks are attached to it. For
in that case the writer remains conscious of his public, yet is
superior to it--an uncomfortable and unfortunate combination, as the
works of Samuel Butler, George Meredith, and Henry James may be taken
to prove. Each despised the public; each desired a public; each
failed to attain a public; and each wreaked his failure upon the
public by a succession, gradually increasing in intensity, of
angularities, obscurities, and affectations which no writer whose
patron was his equal and friend would have thought it necessary to
inflict. Their crocuses, in consequence, are tortured plants,
beautiful and bright, but with something wry-necked about them,
malformed, shrivelled on the one side, overblown on the other. A
touch of the sun would have done them a world of good. Shall we then
rush to the opposite extreme and accept (if in fancy alone) the
flattering proposals which the editors of the Times and the
Daily News may be supposed to make us--"Twenty pounds down for
your crocus in precisely fifteen hundred words, which shall blossom
upon every breakfast table from John o' Groats to the Land's End
before nine o'clock to-morrow morning with the writer's name
attached"?

But will one crocus be enough, and must it not be a very brilliant
yellow to shine so far, to cost so much, and to have one's name
attached to it? The Press is undoubtedly a great multiplier of
crocuses. But if we look at some of these plants, we shall find that
they are only very distantly related to the original little yellow or
purple flower which pokes up through the grass in Kensington Gardens
early in March every year. The newspaper crocus is an amazing but
still a very different plant. It fills precisely the space allotted
to it. It radiates a golden glow. It is genial, affable,
warm-hearted. It is beautifully finished, too, for let nobody think
that the art of "our dramatic critic" of the Times or of Mr.
Lynd of the Daily News is an easy one. It is no despicable
feat to start a million brains running at nine o'clock in the
morning, to give two million eyes something bright and brisk and
amusing to look at. But the night comes and these flowers fade. So
little bits of glass lose their lustre if you take them out of the
sea; great prima donnas howl like hyenas if you shut them up in
telephone boxes; and the most brilliant of articles when removed from
its element is dust and sand and the husks of straw.

Journalism embalmed in a book is unreadable. The patron we want,
then, is one who will help us to preserve our flowers from decay. But
as his qualities change from age to age, and it needs considerable
integrity and conviction not to be dazzled by the pretensions or
bamboozled by the persuasions of the competing crowd, this business
of patron-finding is one of the tests and trials of authorship. To
know whom to write for is to know how to write. Some of the modern
patron's qualities are, however, fairly plain. The writer will
require at this moment, it is obvious, a patron with the book-reading
habit rather than the play-going habit. Nowadays, too, he must be
instructed in the literature of other times and races. But there are
other qualities which our special weaknesses and tendencies demand in
him. There is the question of indecency, for instance, which plagues
us and puzzles us much more than it did the Elizabethans. The
twentieth-century patron must be immune from shock. He must
distinguish infallibly between the little clod of manure which sticks
to the crocus of necessity, and that which is plastered to it out of
bravado. He must be a judge, too, of those social influences which
inevitably play so large a part in modern literature, and able to say
which matures and fortifies, which inhibits and makes sterile.
Further, there is emotion for him to pronounce on, and in no
department can he do more useful work than in bracing a writer
against sentimentality on the one hand and a craven fear of
expressing his feeling on the other. It is worse, he will say, and
perhaps more common, to be afraid of feeling than to feel too much.
He will add, perhaps, something about language, and point out how
many words Shakespeare used and how much grammar Shakespeare
violated, while we, though we keep our fingers so demurely to the
black notes on the piano, have not appreciably improved upon
Antony and Cleopatra. And if you can forget your sex
altogether, he will say, so much the better; a writer has none. But
all this is by the way--elementary and disputable. The patron's prime
quality is something different, only to be expressed perhaps by the
use of that convenient word which cloaks so much--atmosphere. It is
necessary that the patron should shed and envelop the crocus in an
atmosphere which makes it appear a plant of the very highest
importance, so that to misrepresent it is the one outrage not to be
forgiven this side of the grave. He must make us feel that a single
crocus, if it be a real crocus, is enough for him; that he does not
want to be lectured, elevated, instructed, or improved; that he is
sorry that he bullied Carlyle into vociferation, Tennyson into
idyllics, and Ruskin into insanity; that he is now ready to efface
himself or assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to
them by a more than maternal tie; that they are twins indeed, one
dying if the other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes;
that the fate of literature depends upon their happy alliance--all of
which proves, as we began by saying, that the choice of a patron is
of the highest importance. But how to choose rightly? How to write
well? Those are the questions.

As Mr. Rhys truly says, it is unnecessary to go profoundly into
the history and origin of the essay--whether it derives from Socrates
or Siranney the Persian--since, like all living things, its present
is more important than its past. Moreover, the family is widely
spread; and while some of its representatives have risen in the world
and wear their coronets with the best, others pick up a precarious
living in the gutter near Fleet Street. The form, too, admits
variety. The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about
God and Spinoza, or about turtles and Cheapside. But as we turn over
the pages of these five little volumes,1 containing essays
written between 1870 and 1920, certain principles appear to control
the chaos, and we detect in the short period under review something
like the progress of history.

1Modern English Essays, edited by Ernest Rhys,
5 vols. (Dent).

Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which
least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls
it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us
when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure.
Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us
under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake,
refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the
most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest,
indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or
plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be
roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the
world.

So great a feat is seldom accomplished, though the fault may well
be as much on the reader's side as on the writer's. Habit and
lethargy have dulled his palate. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme;
but what art can the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to
sting us wide awake and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but
rather an intensification of life--a basking, with every faculty
alert, in the sun of pleasure? He must know--that is the first
essential--how to write. His learning may be as profound as Mark
Pattison's, but in an essay it must be so fused by the magic of
writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of
the texture. Macaulay in one way, Froude in another, did this
superbly over and over again. They have blown more knowledge into us
in the course of one essay than the innumerable chapters of a hundred
text-books. But when Mark Pattison has to tell us, in the space of
thirty-five little pages, about Montaigne, we feel that he had not
previously assimilated M. Grün. M. Grün was a gentleman who
once wrote a bad book. M. Grün and his book should have been
embalmed for our perpetual delight in amber. But the process is
fatiguing; it requires more time and perhaps more temper than
Pattison had at his command. He served M. Grün up raw, and he
remains a crude berry among the cooked meats, upon which our teeth
must grate for ever. Something of the sort applies to Matthew Arnold
and a certain translator of Spinoza. Literal truth-telling and
finding fault with a culprit for his good are out of place in an
essay, where everything should be for our good and rather for
eternity than for the March number of the Fortnightly Review.
But if the voice of the scold should never be heard in this narrow
plot, there is another voice which is as a plague of locusts--the
voice of a man stumbling drowsily among loose words, clutching
aimlessly at vague ideas, the voice, for example, of Mr. Hutton in
the following passage:

Add to this that his married life was very brief, only seven years
and a half, being unexpectedly cut short, and that his passionate
reverence for his wife's memory and genius--in his own words, "a
religion"--was one which, as he must have been perfectly sensible, he
could not make to appear otherwise than extravagant, not to say an
hallucination, in the eyes of the rest of mankind, and yet that he
was possessed by an irresistible yearning to attempt to embody it in
all the tender and enthusiastic hyperbole of which it is so pathetic
to find a man who gained his fame by his "dry-light" a master, and it
is impossible not to feel that the human incidents in Mr. Mill's
career are very sad.

A book could take that blow, but it sinks an essay. A biography in
two volumes is indeed the proper depository, for there, where the
licence is so much wider, and hints and glimpses of outside things
make part of the feast (we refer to the old type of Victorian
volume), these yawns and stretches hardly matter, and have indeed
some positive value of their own. But that value, which is
contributed by the reader, perhaps illicitly, in his desire to get as
much into the book from all possible sources as he can, must be ruled
out here.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.
Somehow or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both
combined, the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine,
but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.
Of all writers in the first volume, Walter Pater best achieves this
arduous task, because before setting out to write his essay ("Notes
on Leonardo da Vinci") he has somehow contrived to get his material
fused. He is a learned man, but it is not knowledge of Leonardo that
remains with us, but a vision, such as we get in a good novel where
everything contributes to bring the writer's conception as a whole
before us. Only here, in the essay, where the bounds are so strict
and facts have to be used in their nakedness, the true writer like
Walter Pater makes these limitations yield their own quality. Truth
will give it authority; from its narrow limits he will get shape and
intensity; and then there is no more fitting place for some of those
ornaments which the old writers loved and we, by calling them
ornaments, presumably despise. Nowadays nobody would have the courage
to embark on the once famous description of Leonardo's lady who
has

learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep
seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange
webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of
Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary . . .

The passage is too thumb-marked to slip naturally into the
context. But when we come unexpectedly upon "the smiling of women and
the motion of great waters", or upon "full of the refinement of the
dead, in sad, earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones", we
suddenly remember that we have ears and we have eyes, and that the
English language fills a long array of stout volumes with innumerable
words, many of which are of more than one syllable. The only living
Englishman who ever looks into these volumes is, of course, a
gentleman of Polish extraction. But doubtless our abstention saves us
much gush, much rhetoric, much high-stepping and cloud-prancing, and
for the sake of the prevailing sobriety and hard-headedness we should
be willing to barter the splendour of Sir Thomas Browne and the
vigour of Swift.

Yet, if the essay admits more properly than biography or fiction
of sudden boldness and metaphor, and can be polished till every atom
of its surface shines, there are dangers in that too. We are soon in
sight of ornament. Soon the current, which is the life-blood of
literature, runs slow; and instead of sparkling and flashing or
moving with a quieter impulse which has a deeper excitement, words
coagulate together in frozen sprays which, like the grapes on a
Christmas-tree, glitter for a single night, but are dusty and garish
the day after. The temptation to decorate is great where the theme
may be of the slightest. What is there to interest another in the
fact that one has enjoyed a walking tour, or has amused oneself by
rambling down Cheapside and looking at the turtles in Mr. Sweeting's
shop window? Stevenson and Samuel Butler chose very different methods
of exciting our interest in these domestic themes. Stevenson, of
course, trimmed and polished and set out his matter in the
traditional eighteenth-century form. It is admirably done, but we
cannot help feeling anxious, as the essay proceeds, lest the material
may give out under the craftsman's fingers. The ingot is so small,
the manipulation so incessant. And perhaps that is why the
peroration--

To sit still and contemplate--to remember the faces of women
without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy,
to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain
where and what you are--

has the sort of insubstantiality which suggests that by the time
he got to the end he had left himself nothing solid to work with.
Butler adopted the very opposite method. Think your own thoughts, he
seems to say, and speak them as plainly as you can. These turtles in
the shop window which appear to leak out of their shells through
heads and feet suggest a fatal faithfulness to a fixed idea. And so,
striding unconcernedly from one idea to the next, we traverse a large
stretch of ground; observe that a wound in the solicitor is a very
serious thing; that Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is
subject to fits near the Horse Shoe in Tottenham Court Road; take it
for granted that no one really cares about Æschylus; and so,
with many amusing anecdotes and some profound reflections, reach the
peroration, which is that, as he had been told not to see more in
Cheapside than he could get into twelve pages of the Universal
Review, he had better stop. And yet obviously Butler is at least
as careful of our pleasure as Stevenson; and to write like oneself
and call it not writing is a much harder exercise in style than to
write like Addison and call it writing well.

But, however much they differ individually, the Victorian
essayists yet had something in common. They wrote at greater length
than is now usual, and they wrote for a public which had not only
time to sit down to its magazine seriously, but a high, if peculiarly
Victorian, standard of culture by which to judge it. It was worth
while to speak out upon serious matters in an essay; and there was
nothing absurd in writing as well as one possibly could when, in a
month or two, the same public which had welcomed the essay in a
magazine would carefully read it once more in a book. But a change
came from a small audience of cultivated people to a larger audience
of people who were not quite so cultivated. The change was not
altogether for the worse. In volume iii. we find Mr. Birrell and Mr.
Beerbohm. It might even be said that there was a reversion to the
classic type, and that the essay by losing its size and something of
its sonority was approaching more nearly the essay of Addison and
Lamb. At any rate, there is a great gulf between Mr. Birrell on
Carlyle and the essay which one may suppose that Carlyle would have
written upon Mr. Birrell. There is little similarity between A
Cloud of Pinafores, by Max Beerbohm, and A Cynic's
Apology, by Leslie Stephen. But the essay is alive; there is no
reason to despair. As the conditions change so the essayist, most
sensitive of all plants to public opinion, adapts himself, and if he
is good makes the best of the change, and if he is bad the worst. Mr.
Birrell is certainly good; and so we find that, though he has dropped
a considerable amount of weight, his attack is much more direct and
his movement more supple. But what did Mr. Beerbohm give to the essay
and what did he take from it? That is a much more complicated
question, for here we have an essayist who has concentrated on the
work and is without doubt the prince of his profession.

What Mr. Beerbohm gave was, of course, himself. This presence,
which has haunted the essay fitfully from the time of Montaigne, had
been in exile since the death of Charles Lamb. Matthew Arnold was
never to his readers Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately
abbreviated in a thousand homes to Wat. They gave us much, but that
they did not give. Thus, some time in the nineties, it must have
surprised readers accustomed to exhortation, information, and
denunciation to find themselves familiarly addressed by a voice which
seemed to belong to a man no larger than themselves. He was affected
by private joys and sorrows, and had no gospel to preach and no
learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly, and himself
he has remained. Once again we have an essayist capable of using the
essayist's most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool. He has
brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely,
but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is
any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We
only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he
writes. The triumph is the triumph of style. For it is only by
knowing how to write that you can make use in literature of your
self; that self which, while it is essential to literature, is also
its most dangerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet
always--that is the problem. Some of the essayists in Mr. Rhys'
collection, to be frank, have not altogether succeeded in solving it.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in
the eternity of print. As talk, no doubt, it was charming, and
certainly the writer is a good fellow to meet over a bottle of beer.
But literature is stern; it is no use being charming, virtuous, or
even learned and brilliant into the bargain, unless, she seems to
reiterate, you fulfil her first condition--to know how to write.

This art is possessed to perfection by Mr. Beerbohm. But he has
not searched the dictionary for polysyllables. He has not moulded
firm periods or seduced our ears with intricate cadences and strange
melodies. Some of his companions--Henley and Stevenson, for
example--are momentarily more impressive. But A Cloud of
Pinafores has in it that indescribable inequality, stir, and
final expressiveness which belong to life and to life alone. You have
not finished with it because you have read it, any more than
friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and
alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive;
we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered.
So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that,
come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk. Yet it
is true that the essayist is the most sensitive of all writers to
public opinion. The drawing-room is the place where a great deal of
reading is done nowadays, and the essays of Mr. Beerbohm lie, with an
exquisite appreciation of all that the position exacts, upon the
drawing-room table. There is no gin about; no strong tobacco; no
puns, drunkenness, or insanity. Ladies and gentlemen talk together,
and some things, of course, are not said.

But if it would be foolish to attempt to confine Mr. Beerbohm to
one room, it would be still more foolish, unhappily, to make him, the
artist, the man who gives us only his best, the representative of our
age. There are no essays by Mr. Beerbohm in the fourth or fifth
volumes of the present collection. His age seems already a little
distant, and the drawing-room table, as it recedes, begins to look
rather like an altar where, once upon a time, people deposited
offerings--fruit from their own orchards, gifts carved with their own
hands. Now once more the conditions have changed. The public needs
essays as much as ever, and perhaps even more. The demand for the
light middle not exceeding fifteen hundred words, or in special cases
seventeen hundred and fifty, much exceeds the supply. Where Lamb
wrote one essay and Max perhaps writes two, Mr. Belloc at a rough
computation produces three hundred and sixty-five. They are very
short, it is true. Yet with what dexterity the practised essayist
will utilise his space--beginning as close to the top of the sheet as
possible, judging precisely how far to go, when to turn, and how,
without sacrificing a hair's-breadth of paper, to wheel about and
alight accurately upon the last word his editor allows! As a feat of
skill it is well worth watching. But the personality upon which Mr.
Belloc, like Mr. Beerbohm, depends suffers in the process. It comes
to us not with the natural richness of the speaking voice, but
strained and thin and full of mannerisms and affectations, like the
voice of a man shouting through a megaphone to a crowd on a windy
day. "Little friends, my readers", he says in the essay called "An
Unknown Country", and he goes on to tell us how--

There was a shepherd the other day at Findon Fair who had come
from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that
reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of
mountaineers different from the eyes of other men. . . . I went with
him to hear what he had to say, for shepherds talk quite differently
from other men.

Happily this shepherd had little to say, even under the stimulus
of the inevitable mug of beer, about the Unknown Country, for the
only remark that he did make proves him either a minor poet, unfit
for the care of sheep, or Mr. Belloc himself masquerading with a
fountain pen. That is the penalty which the habitual essayist must
now be prepared to face. He must masquerade. He cannot afford the
time either to be himself or to be other people. He must skim the
surface of thought and dilute the strength of personality. He must
give us a worn weekly halfpenny instead of a solid sovereign once a
year.

But it is not Mr. Belloc only who has suffered from the prevailing
conditions. The essays which bring the collection to the year 1920
may not be the best of their authors' work, but, if we except writers
like Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hudson, who have strayed into essay writing
accidentally, and concentrate upon those who write essays habitually,
we shall find them a good deal affected by the change in their
circumstances. To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to
write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired
people coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men
who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw
out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact
with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. And
so, if one reads Mr. Lucas, Mr. Lynd, or Mr. Squire in the bulk, one
feels that a common greyness silvers everything. They are as far
removed from the extravagant beauty of Walter Pater as they are from
the intemperate candour of Leslie Stephen. Beauty and courage are
dangerous spirits to bottle in a column and a half; and thought, like
a brown paper parcel in a waistcoat pocket, has a way of spoiling the
symmetry of an article. It is a kind, tired, apathetic world for
which they write, and the marvel is that they never cease to attempt,
at least, to write well.

But there is no need to pity Mr. Clutton Brock for this change in
the essayist's conditions. He has clearly made the best of his
circumstances and not the worst. One hesitates even to say that he
has had to make any conscious effort in the matter, so naturally has
he effected the transition from the private essayist to the public,
from the drawing-room to the Albert Hall. Paradoxically enough, the
shrinkage in size has brought about a corresponding expansion of
individuality. We have no longer the "I" of Max and of Lamb, but the
"we" of public bodies and other sublime personages. It is "we" who go
to hear the Magic Flute; "we" who ought to profit by it; "we",
in some mysterious way, who, in our corporate capacity, once upon a
time actually wrote it. For music and literature and art must submit
to the same generalisation or they will not carry to the farthest
recesses of the Albert Hall. That the voice of Mr. Clutton Brock, so
sincere and so disinterested, carries such a distance and reaches so
many without pandering to the weakness of the mass or its passions
must be a matter of legitimate satisfaction to us all. But while "we"
are gratified, "I", that unruly partner in the human fellowship, is
reduced to despair. "I" must always think things for himself, and
feel things for himself. To share them in a diluted form with the
majority of well-educated and well-intentioned men and women is for
him sheer agony; and while the rest of us listen intently and profit
profoundly, "I" slips off to the woods and the fields and rejoices in
a single blade of grass or a solitary potato.

In the fifth volume of modern essays, it seems, we have got some
way from pleasure and the art of writing. But in justice to the
essayists of 1920 we must be sure that we are not praising the famous
because they have been praised already and the dead because we shall
never meet them wearing spats in Piccadilly. We must know what we
mean when we say that they can write and give us pleasure. We must
compare them; we must bring out the quality. We must point to this
and say it is good because it is exact, truthful, and
imaginative:

Nay, retire men cannot when they would; neither will they, when it
were Reason; but are impatient of Privateness, even in age and
sickness, which require the shadow: like old Townsmen: that will
still be sitting at their street door, though therby they offer Age
to Scorn . . .

and to this, and say it is bad because it is loose, plausible, and
commonplace:

With courteous and precise cynicism on his lips, he thought of
quiet virginal chambers, of waters singing under the moon, of
terraces where taintless music sobbed into the open night, of pure
maternal mistresses with protecting arms and vigilant eyes, of fields
slumbering in the sunlight, of leagues of ocean heaving under warm
tremulous heavens, of hot ports, gorgeous and perfumed. . . .

It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound and neither feel
nor hear. The comparison makes us suspect that the art of writing has
for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of
an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision
and thus compelling words to its shape, that the diverse company
which includes Lamb and Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and
Vernon Lee and Mr. Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler and Walter
Pater reaches the farther shore. Very various talents have helped or
hindered the passage of the idea into words. Some scrape through
painfully; others fly with every wind favouring. But Mr. Belloc and
Mr. Lucas and Mr. Squire are not fiercely attached to anything in
itself. They share the contemporary dilemma--that lack of an
obstinate conviction which lifts ephemeral sounds through the misty
sphere of anybody's language to the land where there is a perpetual
marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as all definitions are, a good
essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its
curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not
out.

Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or
prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal
without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious
arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country. For
there was always an air of mystery about him. It was partly his
Polish birth, partly his memorable appearance, partly his preference
for living in the depths of the country, out of ear-shot of gossips,
beyond reach of hostesses, so that for news of him one had to depend
upon the evidence of simple visitors with a habit of ringing
door-bells who reported of their unknown host that he had the most
perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke English with a strong
foreign accent.

1 August, 1914.

Still, though it is the habit of death to quicken and focus our
memories, there clings to the genius of Conrad something essentially,
and not accidentally, difficult of approach. His reputation of later
years was, with one obvious exception, undoubtedly the highest in
England; yet he was not popular. He was read with passionate delight
by some; others he left cold and lustreless. Among his readers were
people of the most opposite ages and sympathies. Schoolboys of
fourteen, driving their way through Marryat, Scott, Henty, and
Dickens, swallowed him down with the rest; while the seasoned and the
fastidious, who in process of time have eaten their way to the heart
of literature and there turn over and over a few precious crumbs, set
Conrad scrupulously upon their banqueting table. One source of
difficulty and disagreement is, of course, to be found where men have
at all times found it, in his beauty. One opens his pages and feels
as Helen must have felt when she looked in her glass and realised
that, do what she would, she could never in any circumstances pass
for a plain woman. So Conrad had been gifted, so he had schooled
himself, and such was his obligation to a strange language wooed
characteristically for its Latin qualities rather than its Saxon that
it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or insignificant
movement of the pen. His mistress, his style, is a little somnolent
sometimes in repose. But let somebody speak to her, and then how
magnificently she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph, and
majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would have gained both in
credit and in popularity if he had written what he had to write
without this incessant care for appearances. They block and impede
and distract, his critics say, pointing to those famous passages
which it is becoming the habit to lift from their context and exhibit
among other cut flowers of English prose. He was self-conscious and
stiff and ornate, they complain, and the sound of his own voice was
dearer to him than the voice of humanity in its anguish. The
criticism is familiar, and as difficult to refute as the remarks of
deaf people when Figaro is played. They see the orchestra; far
off they hear a dismal scrape of sound; their own remarks are
interrupted, and, very naturally, they conclude that the ends of life
would be better served if instead of scraping Mozart those fifty
fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That beauty teaches, that beauty
is a disciplinarian, how are we to convince them, since her teaching
is inseparable from the sound of her voice and to that they are deaf?
But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the bulk, and he must
be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that
rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast
and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how
loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is
concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea. But it is
ill work dragging such intimations from their element. Dried in our
little saucers, without the magic and mystery of language, they lose
their power to excite and goad; they lose the drastic power which is
a constant quality of Conrad's prose.

For it was by virtue of something drastic in him, the qualities of
a leader and captain, that Conrad kept his hold over boys and young
people. Until Nostromo was written his characters, as the
young were quick to perceive, were fundamentally simple and heroic,
however subtle the mind and indirect the method of their creator.
They were seafarers, used to solitude and silence. They were in
conflict with Nature, but at peace with man. Nature was their
antagonist; she it was who drew forth honour, magnanimity, loyalty,
the qualities proper to man; she who in sheltered bays reared to
womanhood beautiful girls unfathomable and austere. Above all, it was
Nature who turned out such gnarled and tested characters as Captain
Whalley and old Singleton, obscure but glorious in their obscurity,
who were to Conrad the pick of our race, the men whose praises he was
never tired of celebrating:

They had been strong as those are strong who know neither doubts
nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and
devoted, unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to
represent these men as whining over every mouthful of their food, as
going about their work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had
been men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery--but knew not
fear, and had no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage,
but easy to inspire; voiceless men--but men enough to scorn in their
hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their
fate. It was a fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it
appeared to them the privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived
inarticulate and indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of
affections or the refuge of a home--and died free from the dark
menace of a narrow grave. They were the everlasting children of the
mysterious sea.

Such were the characters of the early books--Lord Jim, Typhoon,
The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Youth; and these books, in spite
of the changes and fashions, are surely secure of their place among
our classics. But they reach this height by means of qualities which
the simple story of adventure, as Marryat told it, or Fenimore
Cooper, has no claim to possess. For it is clear that to admire and
celebrate such men and such deeds, romantically, whole-heartedly and
with the fervour of a lover, one must be possessed of the double
vision; one must be at once inside and out. To praise their silence
one must possess a voice. To appreciate their endurance one must be
sensitive to fatigue. One must be able to live on equal terms with
the Whalleys and the Singletons and yet hide from their suspicious
eyes the very qualities which enable one to understand them. Conrad
alone was able to live that double life, for Conrad was compound of
two men; together with the sea captain dwelt that subtle, refined,
and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow. "A most discreet,
understanding man", he said of Marlow.

Marlow was one of those born observers who are happiest in
retirement. Marlow liked nothing better than to sit on deck, in some
obscure creek of the Thames, smoking and recollecting; smoking and
speculating; sending after his smoke beautiful rings of words until
all the summer's night became a little clouded with tobacco smoke.
Marlow, too, had a profound respect for the men with whom he had
sailed; but he saw the humour of them. He nosed out and described in
masterly fashion those livid creatures who prey successfully upon the
clumsy veterans. He had a flair for human deformity; his humour was
sardonic. Nor did Marlow live entirely wreathed in the smoke of his
own cigars. He had a habit of opening his eyes suddenly and
looking--at a rubbish heap, at a port, at a shop counter--and then
complete in its burning ring of light that thing is flashed bright
upon the mysterious background. Introspective and analytical, Marlow
was aware of this peculiarity. He said the power came to him
suddenly. He might, for instance, overhear a French officer murmur
"Mon Dieu, how the time passes!"

Nothing [he comments] could have been more commonplace than this
remark; but its utterance coincided for me with a moment of vision.
It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with
dull ears, with dormant thoughts. . . . Nevertheless, there can be
but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of
awakening, when we see, hear, understand, ever so
much--everything--in a flash, before we fall back again into our
agreeable somnolence. I raised my eyes when he spoke, and I saw him
as though I had never seen him before.

Picture after picture he painted thus upon that dark background;
ships first and foremost, ships at anchor, ships flying before the
storm, ships in harbour; he painted sunsets and dawns; he painted the
night; he painted the sea in every aspect; he painted the gaudy
brilliancy of Eastern ports, and men and women, their houses and
their attitudes. He was an accurate and unflinching observer,
schooled to that "absolute loyalty towards his feelings and
sensations", which, Conrad wrote, "an author should keep hold of in
his most exalted moments of creation". And very quietly and
compassionately Marlow sometimes lets fall a few words of epitaph
which remind us, with all that beauty and brilliancy before our eyes,
of the darkness of the background.

Thus a rough-and-ready distinction would make us say that it is
Marlow who comments, Conrad who creates. It would lead us, aware that
we are on dangerous ground, to account for that change which, Conrad
tells us, took place when he had finished the last story in the
Typhoon volume--"a subtle change in the nature of the
inspiration"--by some alteration in the relationship of the two old
friends. ". . . it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the
world to write about." It was Conrad, let us suppose, Conrad the
creator, who said that, looking back with sorrowful satisfaction upon
the stories he had told; feeling as he well might that he could never
better the storm in The Nigger of the "Narcissus", or render
more faithful tribute to the qualities of British seamen than he had
done already in Youth and Lord Jim. It was then that
Marlow, the commentator, reminded him how, in the course of nature,
one must grow old, sit smoking on deck, and give up seafaring. But,
he reminded him, those strenuous years had deposited their memories;
and he even went so far perhaps as to hint that, though the last word
might have been said about Captain Whalley and his relation to the
universe, there remained on shore a number of men and women whose
relationships, though of a more personal kind, might be worth looking
into. If we further suppose that there was a volume of Henry James on
board and that Marlow gave his friend the book to take to bed with
him, we may seek support in the fact that it was in 1905 that Conrad
wrote a very fine essay upon that master.

For some years, then, it was Marlow who was the dominant partner.
Nostromo, Chance, The Arrow of Gold represent that stage of
the alliance which some will continue to find the richest of all. The
human heart is more intricate than the forest, they will say; it has
its storms; it has its creatures of the night; and if as novelist you
wish to test man in all his relationships, the proper antagonist is
man; his ordeal is in society, not solitude. For them there will
always be a peculiar fascination in the books where the light of
those brilliant eyes falls not only upon the waste of waters but upon
the heart in its perplexity. But it must be admitted that, if Marlow
thus advised Conrad to shift his angle of vision, the advice was
bold. For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised;
complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand
something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since
he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in
which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited. So
delicate a balance is easily disturbed. After the middle period
Conrad never again was able to bring his figures into perfect
relation with their background. He never believed in his later, and
more highly sophisticated characters as he had believed in his early
seamen. When he had to indicate their relation to that other unseen
world of novelists, the world of values and convictions, he was far
less sure what those values were. Then, over and over again, a single
phrase, "He steered with care", coming at the end of a storm, carried
in it a whole morality. But in this more crowded and complicated
world such terse phrases became less and less appropriate. Complex
men and women of many interests and relations would not submit to so
summary a judgement; or, if they did, much that was important in them
escaped the verdict. And yet it was very necessary to Conrad's
genius, with its luxuriant and romantic power, to have some law by
which its creations could be tried. Essentially--such remained his
creed--this world of civilised and self-conscious people is based
upon "a few very simple ideas"; but where, in the world of thoughts
and personal relations, are we to find them? There are no masts in
drawing-rooms; the typhoon does not test the worth of politicians and
business men. Seeking and not finding such supports, the world of
Conrad's later period has about it an involuntary obscurity, an
inconclusiveness, almost a disillusionment which baffles and
fatigues. We lay hold in the dusk only of the old nobilities and
sonorities: fidelity, compassion, honour, service--beautiful always,
but now a little wearily reiterated, as if times had changed. Perhaps
it was Marlow who was at fault. His habit of mind was a trifle
sedentary. He had sat upon deck too long; splendid in soliloquy, he
was less apt in the give and take of conversation; and those "moments
of vision" flashing and fading, do not serve as well as steady
lamplight to illumine the ripple of life and its long, gradual years.
Above all, perhaps, he did not take into account how, if Conrad was
to create, it was essential first that he should believe.

Therefore, though we shall make expeditions into the later books
and bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain
by most of us untrodden. It is the earlier books--Youth, Lord Jim,
Typhoon, The Nigger of the "Narcissus"--that we shall read in
their entirety. For when the question is asked, what of Conrad will
survive and where in the ranks of novelists we are to place him,
these books, with their air of telling us something very old and
perfectly true, which had lain hidden but is now revealed, will come
to mind and make such questions and comparisons seem a little futile.
Complete and still, very chaste and very beautiful, they rise in the
memory as, on these hot summer nights, in their slow and stately way
first one star comes out and then another.

In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck
by the fact that two critics at the same table at the same moment
will pronounce completely different opinions about the same book.
Here, on the right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose; on
the left, simultaneously, a mere mass of waste-paper which, if the
fire could survive it, should be thrown upon the flames. Yet both
critics are in agreement about Milton and about Keats. They display
an exquisite sensibility and have undoubtedly a genuine enthusiasm.
It is only when they discuss the work of contemporary writers that
they inevitably come to blows. The book in question, which is at once
a lasting contribution to English literature and a mere farrago of
pretentious mediocrity, was published about two months ago. That is
the explanation; that is why they differ.

The explanation is a strange one. It is equally disconcerting to
the reader who wishes to take his bearings in the chaos of
contemporary literature and to the writer who has a natural desire to
know whether his own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost
utter darkness, is likely to burn for ever among the fixed luminaries
of English letters or, on the contrary, to put out the fire. But if
we identify ourselves with the reader and explore his dilemma first,
our bewilderment is short-lived enough. The same thing has happened
so often before. We have heard the doctors disagreeing about the new
and agreeing about the old twice a year on the average, in spring and
autumn, ever since Robert Elsmere, or was it Stephen Phillips,
somehow pervaded the atmosphere, and there was the same disagreement
among grown-up people about these books too. It would be much more
marvellous, and indeed much more upsetting, if, for a wonder, both
gentlemen agreed, pronounced Blank's book an undoubted masterpiece,
and thus faced us with the necessity of deciding whether we should
back their judgement to the extent of ten and sixpence. Both are
critics of reputation; the opinions tumbled out so spontaneously here
will be starched and stiffened into columns of sober prose which will
uphold the dignity of letters in England and America.

It must be some innate cynicism, then, some ungenerous distrust of
contemporary genius, which determines us automatically as the talk
goes on that, were they to agree--which they show no signs of
doing--half a guinea is altogether too large a sum to squander upon
contemporary enthusiasms, and the case will be met quite adequately
by a card to the library. Still the question remains, and let us put
it boldly to the critics themselves. Is there no guidance nowadays
for a reader who yields to none in reverence for the dead, but is
tormented by the suspicion that reverence for the dead is vitally
connected with understanding of the living? After a rapid survey both
critics are agreed that there is unfortunately no such person. For
what is their own judgement worth where new books are concerned?
Certainly not ten and sixpence. And from the stores of their
experience they proceed to bring forth terrible examples of past
blunders; crimes of criticism which, if they had been committed
against the dead and not against the living, would have lost them
their jobs and imperilled their reputations. The only advice they can
offer is to respect one's own instincts, to follow them fearlessly
and, rather than submit them to the control of any critic or reviewer
alive, to check them by reading and reading again the masterpieces of
the past.

Thanking them humbly, we cannot help reflecting that it was not
always so. Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a
discipline, which controlled the great republic of readers in a way
which is now unknown. That is not to say that the great critic--the
Dryden, the Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold--was an impeccable
judge of contemporary work, whose verdicts stamped the book indelibly
and saved the reader the trouble of reckoning the value for himself.
The mistakes of these great men about their own contemporaries are
too notorious to be worth recording. But the mere fact of their
existence had a centralising influence. That alone, it is not
fantastic to suppose, would have controlled the disagreements of the
dinner-table and given to random chatter about some book just out an
authority now entirely to seek. The diverse schools would have
debated as hotly as ever, but at the back of every reader's mind
would have been the consciousness that there was at least one man who
kept the main principles of literature closely in view: who, if you
had taken to him some eccentricity of the moment, would have brought
it into touch with permanence and tethered it by his own authority in
the contrary blasts of praise and blame.1 But when it
comes to the making of a critic, nature must be generous and society
ripe. The scattered dinner-tables of the modern world, the chase and
eddy of the various currents which compose the society of our time,
could only be dominated by a giant of fabulous dimensions. And where
is even the very tall man whom we have the right to expect? Reviewers
we have but no critic; a million competent and incorruptible
policemen but no judge. Men of taste and learning and ability are for
ever lecturing the young and celebrating the dead. But the too
frequent result of their able and industrious pens is a desiccation
of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones.
Nowhere shall we find the downright vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with
his fine and natural bearing, his profound insight and sanity, or
Flaubert and the tremendous power of his fanaticism, or Coleridge,
above all, brewing in his head the whole of poetry and letting issue
now and then one of those profound general statements which are
caught up by the mind when hot with the friction of reading as if
they were of the soul of the book itself.

1 How violent these are two quotations will show. "It
[Told by an Idiot] should be read as the Tempest should
be read, and as Gulliver's Travels should be read, for if Miss
Macaulay's poetic gift happens to be less sublime than those of the
author of the Tempest, and if her irony happens to be less
tremendous than that of the author of Gulliver's Travels, her
justice and wisdom are no less noble than theirs."--The Daily
News.

The next day we read: "For the rest one can only say that if Mr.
Eliot had been pleased to write in demotic English The Waste
Land might not have been, as it just is to all but
anthropologists, and literati, so much waste-paper."--The
Manchester Guardian.

And to all this, too, the critics generously agree. A great
critic, they say, is the rarest of beings. But should one
miraculously appear, how should we maintain him, on what should we
feed him? Great critics, if they are not themselves great poets, are
bred from the profusion of the age. There is some great man to be
vindicated, some school to be founded or destroyed. But our age is
meagre to the verge of destitution. There is no name which dominates
the rest. There is no master in whose workshop the young are proud to
serve apprenticeship. Mr. Hardy has long since withdrawn from the
arena, and there is something exotic about the genius of Mr. Conrad
which makes him not so much an influence as an idol, honoured and
admired, but aloof and apart. As for the rest, though they are many
and vigorous and in the full flood of creative activity, there is
none whose influence can seriously affect his contemporaries, or
penetrate beyond our day to that not very distant future which it
pleases us to call immortality. If we make a century our test, and
ask how much of the work produced in these days in England will be in
existence then, we shall have to answer not merely that we cannot
agree upon the same book, but that we are more than doubtful whether
such a book there is. It is an age of fragments. A few stanzas, a few
pages, a chapter here and there, the beginning of this novel, the end
of that, are equal to the best of any age or author. But can we go to
posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those
days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous
rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the
critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the
novelists and poets.

At first the weight of pessimism seems sufficient to bear down all
opposition. Yes, it is a lean age, we repeat, with much to justify
its poverty; but, frankly, if we pit one century against another the
comparison seems overwhelmingly against us. Waverley, The
Excursion, Kubla Khan, Don Juan, Hazlitt's Essays, Pride and
Prejudice, Hyperion, and Prometheus Unbound were all
published between 1800 and 1821. Our century has not lacked industry;
but if we ask for masterpieces it appears on the face of it that the
pessimists are right. It seems as if an age of genius must be
succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by
cleanliness and hard work. All honour, of course, to those who have
sacrificed their immortality to set the house in order. But if we ask
for masterpieces, where are we to look? A little poetry, we may feel
sure, will survive; a few poems by Mr. Yeats, by Mr. Davies, by Mr.
De la Mare. Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness, but
hours of something very different. Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is
perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages in Far Away and Long
Ago will undoubtedly go to posterity entire. Ulysses was a
memorable catastrophe--immense in daring, terrific in disaster. And
so, picking and choosing, we select now this, now that, hold it up
for display, hear it defended or derided, and finally have to meet
the objection that even so we are only agreeing with the critics that
it is an age incapable of sustained effort, littered with fragments,
and not seriously to be compared with the age that went before.

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added
lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly
conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. It is a
barren and exhausted age, we repeat; we must look back with envy to
the past. Meanwhile it is one of the first fine days of spring. Life
is not altogether lacking in colour. The telephone, which interrupts
the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty
observations, has a romance of its own. And the random talk of people
who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out
has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings,
beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for
ever. But this is life; the talk is about literature. We must try to
disentangle the two, and justify the rash revolt of optimism against
the superior plausibility, the finer distinction, of pessimism.

Our optimism, then, is largely instinctive. It springs from the
fine day and the wine and the talk; it springs from the fact that
when life throws up such treasures daily, daily suggests more than
the most voluble can express, much though we admire the dead, we
prefer life as it is. There is something about the present which we
would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages
to live in. And modern literature, with all its imperfections, has
the same hold on us and the same fascination. It is like a relation
whom we snub and scarify daily, but, after all, cannot do without. It
has the same endearing quality of being that which we are, that which
we have made, that in which we live, instead of being something,
however august, alien to ourselves and beheld from the outside. Nor
has any generation more need than ours to cherish its contemporaries.
We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the
scale--the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages--has
shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and
made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we
find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been
impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not
been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very
perfectly expressed. New books lure us to read them partly in the
hope that they will reflect this re-arrangement of our
attitude--these scenes, thoughts, and apparently fortuitous groupings
of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so keen a sense of
novelty--and, as literature does, give it back into our keeping,
whole and comprehended. Here indeed there is every reason for
optimism. No age can have been more rich than ours in writers
determined to give expression to the differences which separate them
from the past and not to the resemblances which connect them with it.
It would be invidious to mention names, but the most casual reader
dipping into poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to
be impressed by the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the
widespread originality of our time. But our exhilaration is strangely
curtailed. Book after book leaves us with the same sense of promise
unachieved, of intellectual poverty, of brilliance which has been
snatched from life but not transmuted into literature. Much of what
is best in contemporary work has the appearance of being noted under
pressure, taken down in a bleak shorthand which preserves with
astonishing brilliance the movements and expressions of the figures
as they pass across the screen. But the flash is soon over, and there
remains with us a profound dissatisfaction. The irritation is as
acute as the pleasure was intense.

After all, then, we are back at the beginning, vacillating from
extreme to extreme, at one moment enthusiastic, at the next
pessimistic, unable to come to any conclusion about our
contemporaries. We have asked the critics to help us, but they have
deprecated the task. Now, then, is the time to accept their advice
and correct these extremes by consulting the masterpieces of the
past. We feel ourselves indeed driven to them, impelled not by calm
judgement but by some imperious need to anchor our instability upon
their security. But, honestly, the shock of the comparison between
past and present is at first disconcerting. Undoubtedly there is a
dullness in great books. There is an unabashed tranquillity in page
after page of Wordsworth and Scott and Miss Austen which is sedative
to the verge of somnolence. Opportunities occur and they neglect
them. Shades and subtleties accumulate and they ignore them. They
seem deliberately to refuse to gratify those senses which are
stimulated so briskly by the moderns; the senses of sight, of sound,
of touch--above all, the sense of the human being, his depth and the
variety of his perceptions, his complexity, his confusion, his self,
in short. There is little of all this in the works of Wordsworth and
Scott and Jane Austen. From what, then, arises that sense of security
which gradually, delightfully, and completely overcomes us? It is the
power of their belief--their conviction, that imposes itself upon us.
In Wordsworth, the philosophic poet, this is obvious enough. But it
is equally true of the careless Scott, who scribbled masterpieces to
build castles before breakfast, and of the modest maiden lady who
wrote furtively and quietly simply to give pleasure. In both there is
the same natural conviction that life is of a certain quality. They
have their judgement of conduct. They know the relations of human
beings towards each other and towards the universe. Neither of them
probably has a word to say about the matter outright, but everything
depends on it. Only believe, we find ourselves saying, and all the
rest will come of itself. Only believe, to take a very simple
instance which the recent publication of The Watsons brings to
mind, that a nice girl will instinctively try to soothe the feelings
of a boy who has been snubbed at a dance, and then, if you believe it
implicitly and unquestioningly, you will not only make people a
hundred years later feel the same thing, but you will make them feel
it as literature. For certainty of that kind is the condition which
makes it possible to write. To believe that your impressions hold
good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of
personality. It is to be free, as Scott was free, to explore with a
vigour which still holds us spell-bound the whole world of adventure
and romance. It is also the first step in that mysterious process in
which Jane Austen was so great an adept. The little grain of
experience once selected, believed in, and set outside herself, could
be put precisely in its place, and she was then free to make it, by a
process which never yields its secrets to the analyst, into that
complete statement which is literature.

So then our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to
believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that
happens to himself. They cannot make a world, because they are not
free of other human beings. They cannot tell stories because they do
not believe that stories are true. They cannot generalise. They
depend on their senses and emotions, whose testimony is trustworthy,
rather than on their intellects whose message is obscure. And they
have perforce to deny themselves the use of some of the most powerful
and some of the most exquisite of the weapons of their craft. With
the whole wealth of the English language at the back of them, they
timidly pass about from hand to hand and book to book only the
meanest copper coins. Set down at a fresh angle of the eternal
prospect they can only whip out their notebooks and record with
agonised intensity the flying gleams, which light on what? and the
transitory splendours, which may, perhaps, compose nothing whatever.
But here the critics interpose, and with some show of justice.

If this description holds good, they say, and is not, as it may
well be, entirely dependent upon our position at the table and
certain purely personal relationships to mustard pots and flower
vases, then the risks of judging contemporary work are greater than
ever before. There is every excuse for them if they are wide of the
mark; and no doubt it would be better to retreat, as Matthew Arnold
advised, from the burning ground of the present to the safe
tranquillity of the past. "We enter on burning ground," wrote Matthew
Arnold, "as we approach the poetry of times so near to us, poetry
like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, of which the estimates
are so often not only personal, but personal with passion," and this,
they remind us, was written in the year 1880. Beware, they say, of
putting under the microscope one inch of a ribbon which runs many
miles; things sort themselves out if you wait; moderation, and a
study of the classics are to be recommended. Moreover, life is short;
the Byron centenary is at hand; and the burning question of the
moment is, did he, or did he not, marry his sister? To sum up,
then--if indeed any conclusion is possible when everybody is talking
at once and it is time to be going--it seems that it would be wise
for the writers of the present to renounce the hope of creating
masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books
but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in
his hands, point to their blots and scrawls and erasions, and tear
them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket.
He will keep them because other students will find them very useful.
It is from the notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the
future are made. Literature, as the critics were saying just now, has
lasted long, has undergone many changes, and it is only a short sight
and a parochial mind that will exaggerate the importance of these
squalls, however they may agitate the little boats now tossing out at
sea. The storm and the drenching are on the surface; continuity and
calm are in the depths.

As for the critics whose task it is to pass judgement upon the
books of the moment, whose work, let us admit, is difficult,
dangerous, and often distasteful, let us ask them to be generous of
encouragement, but sparing of those wreaths and coronets which are so
apt to get awry, and fade, and make the wearers, in six months time,
look a little ridiculous. Let them take a wider, a less personal view
of modern literature, and look indeed upon the writers as if they
were engaged upon some vast building, which being built by common
effort, the separate workmen may well remain anonymous. Let them slam
the door upon the cosy company where sugar is cheap and butter
plentiful, give over, for a time at least, the discussion of that
fascinating topic--whether Byron married his sister--and,
withdrawing, perhaps, a handsbreadth from the table where we sit
chattering, say something interesting about literature itself. Let us
buttonhole them as they leave, and recall to their memory that gaunt
aristocrat, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept a milk-white horse in her
stable in readiness for the Messiah and was for ever scanning the
mountain tops, impatiently but with confidence, for signs of his
approach, and ask them to follow her example; scan the horizon; see
the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way for
masterpieces to come.